



«ra mmmM 



rafflBsl JOHN WmWmwmn 

UhSB R9BB HBHftfl wmnD mBri 




5$ 



Isl mm 

HHraHBHi 

MMA MMMMMPHraMM OBK 

Kjlrtmkn ifwIIWBIHWMnWiiHilgi 

wMBMmMaimnMmlmK SilammiKK 
HBDynHnDDRHKHiMBWIiMRIUnfliyVIn 



Hi 
nHnHH 



ww 



■at 



£^ 1 















cK /- 



%* ^ 



' 



x°°- 



> 






*»& 


























- 



>- V s 






























v- C- 



^ -A\ 



«0 o 






v 






V- 









^ ^ 
















■^ ^ 



x° = 



^ -tor '^ v ;S S~^ W' *>i& 










Oo 







^ v*" 












AN 



ESS AT 



ON 



WARBURTON'S 

DIVINE 

LEGATION. 



A FELLOWSHIP 

PROBATIONARY EXERCISE 

I 




HEREFORD, 
PRINTED BY E. G. WRIGHT, JOURNAL OFFICE, 



1828. 



Co 



ESSAY 



ON 



Wterhurton's Divine Legation, 



CHAPTER I. 

Religious Controversy in general; — its causes and effects. 

THE connection between the moral and the physical world, 
the constitution of the universe within us, our reason, passions, 
and affections, and that of the material system without us and 
around us, their identity of design, and the marks they bear of 
the same divine origin, is a most fertile and interesting subject 
of inquiry. Here it will be enough to touch slightly on one 
only of the many points of resemblance observable in their 
bearing on our own minds and feelings, the only relation which 
is valuable to the practical student of either. Truth of all 
kinds, physical and moral, is liable to the same impediments, 
the same passions to oppose, the same prejudices to thwart it; 
the same inveterate principle of slothfulness, the strongest per- 
haps in our whole nature, to prevent its practical usefulness, 
even when its evidence is too strong for the passive under- 
standing to resist. The only difference between the two cases 
is, that the obstacles in the way of moral truth act with a ten- 
fold energy. On the one hand our mind only and (if we may 
so say) our intellectual passions are in arms, on the other 
the whole powers of our nature ! On the one hand are 



faculties that end in theory, or which, if they end not there, 
have few occasions for action, on the other are those moral 
sentiments which, good or bad, are the absolute disposers of 
our lives, and the great and efficient actors in that stage whereon 
every man must play his part. The prominent facts indeed 
in both cases seem too obvious to escape the most careless and 
indifferent observer, and too full of meaning to deceive the 
most superficial reasoner. Yet even these are rather forced 
upon us than collected by us, and drift loosely and carelessly 
down the current of the mind, along with that heterogeneous 
and chaotic mass of feeling, passion, and opinion which consti- 
tutes the substance of that intellectual nature which, though 
forced by its framer to think in some way or other, enjoys an 
unlimited charter to distinguish, infer, and systematize as its 
own judgment or caprice may direct. If such be the state 
with the facts of the case, the first simple elements of our 
knowledge and belief, much more must the same difficulties 
extend themselves to all attempts towards attaining that form 
of theory and philosophy which can alone consolidate and 
harmonize the whole. To pass over the history of those laws 
of the material world which (revealed at length by the inspi- 
ration of stupendous genius) have been disbelieved by one half 
of the generations of men from the same prejudice through 
which they will be believed by the other, to pass over the 
annals of natural religion, let us at once proceed to the Chris- 
tian dispensation. In that awful repository of divine truth are 
opened to us the mysteries of our wonderful nature — the end 
of our being — the hopes and fears of our immortal mind — the 
sphere originally traced out for it — the causes that have driven 
it from its orbit, and the means devised by Infinite Wisdom to 
controul its eccentricities, and to reconcile its wayward and 
jarring motions to himself, the centre and end of all things. 
Executed in time, yet conceived in the past and extended into 
the coming eternity, it claims an integral part in the transac- 
tions of the universe, from the moment that prophecy first 
unclosed her lips to fallen man to its consummation, in blood, 
on Calvary, from the infant Church of Palestine to that which 



shall at length embrace all nations and tongues in its circum- 
ference, its records swallow up in their wide and various rela- 
tions, the history of the world. But we need not cast our eyes 
on these sublime features of Christianity, we need not contem- 
plate it in this the greatness of its stature, in which its hundred 
arms extend its influence over the general concerns of mankind, 
to enable us to discover how inseparably are its records inter- 
twined with the physical and moral history of the human race. 
Inseparably indeed, and to its corruption, has it been so con- 
nected, and, but for the protecting shield which Omnipotence 
has thrown over its frailty to its utter annihilation ! If we 
turn, but for a moment, from those scriptures of truth in 
which its features are mirrored, the change which its lineaments 
receive, discoloured, distorted, transmuted into every deformity 
of error, betrays, but too well, the misty and tainted atmos- 
phere through which its pure and holy light is refracted to us. 
Heaven-born and heaven-descended it seems the monstrous 
progeny of earth and hell, commissioned to guide and to control 
the natural passions, it becomes the minister and satellite of its 
own subjects ; and even when it has not utterly lost its origi- 
nal qualities, it has been so fused and melted into the general 
mass of human passions, feelings, and infirmities, that the 
strictest analysis can scarcely detect its presence in so discordant 
an assemblage. But, without overcharging the picture or 
sacrificing correctness to effect, it is a certain but melancholy 
truth, that even in the fairest seasons of the church, when no 
persecution has menaced its supremacy from without, or even 
heresy reared its head from within her pale, a pestilent spirit of 
dissention has been at work among her professors, and her 
champions, without any foreign foe to combat withal, have 
waged an inglorious warfare against themselves. This is 
perhaps the inevitable destiny of human infirmities, and the 
religious, like the natural atmosphere, craves the terrible aid of 
storms and tornadoes to agitate its stagnation into active 
healthfulness ! Yet, while we adore the mysterious law, which, 
by reconciling contrarieties, brings good out of evil, the un- 
chastened passions, and unchristian feelings which too often 



call it into action ought, not the less, to be visited with the 
severest malediction. Eighteen centuries have rolled away, 
and have witnessed the birth, the triumph, the corruption, and 
regeneration of Christianity — they have seen her crowned with 
thorns, and nailed to the cross — they have seen her, in her 
usurpation, lay her insulting foot on the necks of kings and of 
conquerors — they have seen her in her own pure and holy 
form, the associate, not the tyrant of civil government, exercise 
her legitimate empire over the fate of mankind, blessing and 
blest — yet they have still witnessed the Church the arena of 
gladiatorial combats, her name the whetstone of polemic wit, 
and her sacred archives the exhaustless armoury of theological 
war. Few transactions perhaps offer to an acute and reflect- 
ing observer, a lesson more pregnant with instruction than the 
annals of religious dispute, and in the developement of its 
causes, appearances, and effects, a master-hand might trace, in 
full and striking relief for the instruction and wonder of men, 
the map of the human mind. Gigantic talents unequally 
coping with malignant jealousy or presumptuous ignorance, 
honest zeal stung into the acrimony of personal feeling, and 
personal feeling masquing in the dress of zeal, genius spinning 
its bullion into threads of sophistry, and learned dullness 
fencing its feeble vision against the brightness of truth by dis- 
turbing the dust of antiquity, the fiery ebullitions of unde- 
signing enthusiasm, and the poison distilled by the alembic of 
cold-hearted philosophy, these and more than these, varied 
into every fantastic shape, and grouped into every imaginable 
combination, have been pressed into the service of controver- 
sial strife ! Yet, whilst all parties are in other respects diame- 
trically opposed, where opposition matters not ; in one where 
their agreement is fatal, they are in most cases too intimately 
leagued. Whilst each boasts the public good, as his motive, 
each emblazons truth as his banner and recognizance, and 
hurls forth her name as his watch-word and cry of battle, the 
passions of the man are gratified, the interests of the party 
furthered, their respective heroes caressed and crowned, whilst 
the question at issue remains where it was, truth is blasphemed, 



and religion, to which she is the handmaid, sees in the victories 
and trophies of this civil discord, nothing but the signs of her 
own decay, and the monuments of her own ruin ! — Religious 
disputes indeed are attended by one disadvantage to which no 
other controversy can be ever liable. Controversies are 
assuredly in all cases to be deprecated, and are then only 
advantageous, or even innocent, when conducted with that 
calmness, temper and moderation, which can alone extract their 
sting, and refine them from those drops of cavil and disputa- 
tion, which are no less fatal to the interests of true science, than 
of true religion. Their influence extends beyond themselves, 
the infinite relations, which identify every individual with the 
society to which he belongs, exert their accustomed power, and 
they go far, very far, to untune that harmony, and to affect that 
spirit of unity, from which the happiness and comfort of every 
society whatever, must, in the end, emanate. Here, however, 
the evil, in ordinary cases, checks itself, and, whatever be 
the mischief which society in general suffers, the dishonour is 
confined to the individuals, who have thrown the brands of 
discord about them to disturb its repose. But, in the case 
of religion, the evil is more multiplied, and the poison is more 
widely diffused. Society, in the general sense of the term, has 
nothing external to itself; it is, as it were, self-existent and 
self-contained, and its good and evil must flow from its own 
bosom ! Religion, after all, is confined but to a smaller, within 
a larger community, and receives many an external jar, direc- 
tion, and impulse — its nature is to extend its influence, and to 
leaven the surrounding mass with its own spirit — it hangs, there- 
fore, much on the opinions of those, who are beyond it, and 
that opinion will hinge materially on the temper, that seems to 
animate its constitution. That, therefore which in the one 
case, is a fault, in the other, becomes a sin — that which in the 
one is the infringement of a decency, is in the other the aban- 
donment of a principle, — that which only affects a grace and 
ornament of the one, goes near to annihilate the very life and 
essence of the other. But, in order to counteract this tendency, 
it is happily ordered, that the records of our religion present 



at least as much purely intellectual materials for the under- 
standing, as moral themes and subjects to the feelings. Those 
very fundamental doctrines, which lie within the grasp of 
ordinary comprehension, and are open for the acceptance, 
through humble faith, of the lowest among the sons of men, yet 
afford, in the establishment of their evidence, and the contem- 
plation of their profound mysteries, an ample field for the 
most unbounded intellect. For those restless minds again, 
which disdain the broad and ample stream of truth, as too 
confined for their ambition, each of those thousand currents 
which feed it, and trace their course into more wild and distant 
regions, is ever tempting and rewarding the enterprize of 
adventurers ; whilst, for still more subtil and ardent spirits, the 
infinite space of religious metaphysics unfolds its boundless 
but perilous abyss to the flight of the boldest wing. Each, in 
his own sphere, may be useful to the cause of truth; each lays 
up his treasure in her store-house ; and all, in their several 
degrees, merit the gratitude of the cause they serve. — 
This advantage, at least, accrues, — that the superabundant 
and fermenting strength of intellect, which might not have 
brooked what it would deem the trammels of a mere moral 
system, is sent out as it were, into distant colonies, and 
expended in enterprizes, which, if they succeed, add fresh 
glory to the cause, and, if they fail, still leave its intrinsic 
vigor fresh and unimpaired, its real evidences still quick with 
the vitality of truth, and the rock on which it reposes, though 
shorn of a few superfluous and fantastic pinnacles, with its 
everlasting foundations cast as deep and firm as ever ! This, 
while it multiplies the subjects of contention, in multiplying 
them makes them less important, makes them as much philo- 
sophical, as religious disputations, and, diverting them into col- 
lateral inquiries, lessens the danger, to which Christian truth is 
itself exposed. The sight of a Controversialist has a strangely 
magnifying power; and, but for the use of this mental micros- 
cope, it would be difficult to account for the disproportioned 
growth, into which many a fiercely disputed trifle has been 
suddenly exalted — so much so, that there is nothing perhaps 



in religion which, if we regard it, not in its absolute, but re- 
lative and possible importance ; which, if we look, not to its 
value in the eye of cool reason, but to the influence its dex- 
trous use may hold on the passions of mankind, can be, with 
propriety, denominated a trifle. Scarcely any fact or opinion 
has an isolated existence; and in the vast circle of the intellec- 
tual world, orb is enclosed within orb, coil rolled up within 
coil in the mighty chain, which, though infinitely subdivided, 
and multiplied into a thousand parts, which have no apparent 
connection with each other, is linked by subtle and invisible 
rivets into one stupendous whole. As this will, in a greater or 
less degree, apply to all cases, it will be no longer a matter of 
wonder, that many an inconsiderable proposition should be 
made to sustain the weight of all its kindred truths, and that 
perverse ingenuity should trace the genealogy of many an in- 
different hypothesis to a relationship, intimate and indissolu- 
ble, with the most awful verities, and concentrate the whole 
strength of themselves and their cause on a desolate and de- 
bateable spot, which, like some little island, that is made at 
once the arena and prize of two mighty Monarchies, seems to 
ask with amazement, whence comes the interest, which turns 
all eyes towards it, and whence the gorgeous array, that mus- 
ters on its barrenness ! A general principle, imperfectly un- 
derstood, or maliciously applied, pushed beyond its legitimate 
limits, or ( assaulted only in its exceptions, — an assertion inad- 
vertently hazarded, fiercely assailed, and indignantly and fu- 
riously supported, with good intentions perhaps on both sides, 
but with candour and openness on neither, may be deemed a 
compendium and fair epitome of but too many of the controver- 
sies, which have convulsed the modern Church. Accordingly, 
when the lapse of time has hushed the tumult of the contest, 
when the question, like a human body unnaturally excited, 
has sunk into a decrepitude as premature as its vigor, — when 
we venture to snatch it from beneath the shadow of the great 
names, which have sheltered its pigmy growth, and with blood 
that has ceased to boil, and ears to tingle, and eyes to be daz- 
zled, feel and touch and handle it, we gaze on the shrivelled 



8 

phantom, which is all that remains to reward our inquiring 
search, with wonder, disappointment, and disgust! But 
there is one cause of controversy of influence so wide, so par- 
donable, and so natural, that, in this sketch, brief as it is, it 
were scarcely excusable to omit it, or even, to a certain extent, 
to investigate its philosophy — the dread of what is new, or seems 
so, and attachment to what is old. These feelings, indeed, all 
inactive and negative as they seem, probably play a much more 
distinguished part than is generally imagined, in that alternate 
advancement and retardation of things, political, moral, and 
religious, which is intended to adjust them for their final con- 
summation — We are so formed, as individuals, as to be capa- 
ble of exercising free-will, and to be thereby entitled to the 
character of moral agents, and to befitting punishment and 
reward. Yet, by the arbitrary structure of the whole, and 
the necessary operation of certain passions and instincts in an 
appointed direction, it comes to pass, that without any delibe- 
rate aim of the agents, nay, against every effort of individuals 
to thwart it by the perverse and countless eccentricities of pre- 
dominant self-love, the world is conducted in the path traced 
out by its framer, its revolutions made to converge to one end, 
and his unthinking creatures, as a whole, invisibly, but im- 
mediately and irresistibly controuled by his omnipotence and 
wisdom ! Out of all this mechanism, this exquisite calcula- 
tion of forces, this arrangement of infinite wheels, this appa- 
rent discord but resulting harmony, we need only, for our pre- 
sent purpose, mark the antagonist powers of the passion for 
novelty and the prejudice for existing things. Linked toge- 
ther, as twins, yet ever struggling with each other, as ene- 
mies, — the one the main-spring, the other the regulator of all 
knowledge and improvement, — the one, the gage for the disco- 
very and acceptance of all that is useful, the other the earnest 
of its stability, their conflicting elements settle into equilibrium. 
The very excess, the very extremes in which they are usually 
displayed, acting as opposite poisons, neutralize each other ; 
and the mad lust for novelty, the source of all political and 
religious revolution, is amply counterbalanced by the bigotry, 



the imbecility, and very dotage of the mind, which confers an 
apotheosis on the errors, and an unmerited immortality on the 
follies of former ages. In the first centuries of the Church, 
before time had hallowed its doctrines, authorities settled its 
land-marks, or long discipline broken in the minds of its 
disciples to the wholesome restraints of an establishment, 
the frightful heresies, that stalked abroad to its destruction, 
seem rather the dreams of impure delirium, than the inter- 
pretations of reasonable men. Theirs were the errors of an 
unbridled and licentious imagination, the excitement of no- 
velty, the froth and fumes of excessive agitation. Later 
ages, on the contrary, overwhelmed with authorities, and 
stagnating in precedent, have rued the plagues, that have 
exhaled from the marshes of quiescent Christianity. The in- 
fluence of age, powerful in all things, and insensibly exerting 
its energy even on the boldest innovators, is omnipotent in 
religion ; instinct, reason, and imagination bind it with a triple 
cord upon us ; and the earliest feelings of our own minds, as 
well as those of the great world itself, are consecrated to it. 
We look, with mingled love and awe, on the dim and mighty 
fabric ; we adore in it the venerableness, not the infirmity of 
years, the majesty, not the deformity of collected ages. But 
we mar the symmetry of the temple by fanciful additions of 
our own ; we build beneath its columns the mean huts of our 
own imaginations ; and then view, with indiscriminating horror, 
the least assault on that which, in our association, has ever 
been holy ; and deem it sacrilege to move though but the 
smallest stone, from a structure where all things alike are con- 
secrated to our eyes by the moss and lichens of antiquity ! 

This feeling, connected as it is with the best affections of 
our nature, and always, perhaps, respectable, is yet so apt 
to degenerate into a bigotry, which would fain strangle 
all freedom of thought in its cradle, that it can scarcely 
be watched with too jealous an eye. Truth, moreover, is ever 
the same, and depends not on time; it challenges the under- 
standing, and does not circumvent the affections ; it is the tried 
staple of reason, and not the current coin of authority ; and 



10 

every now and then, bold and independent spirits will arise, 
who assert their birthright of freedom, and, unrelentingly 
submitting the precious metal to the crucible and the fire, 
expel into airy fumes many a tainting mixture, and adulterat- 
ing dross. Nor must we forget a very important distinction 
between divinity and theology. Divinity is the knowlege of 
what the holy scriptures have made essential to our conduct here, 
and our hopes of immortality hereafter; and admits not, there- 
fore, of that range for inventive intellect and advancing truth, 
on which we have dwelt so long. But theology comprehends, 
under its empire, all truths whatever, which just inference may 
elicit from holy writ, and is really liable to the operation of all 
the causes, which, either to advance or retard their progress, 
other sciences have experienced. It has undergone the same 
revolutions, the same changes, the same alternate resurrection 
of once established truth, and once exploded error; and, though 
very much has been done to settle its laws, and define its 
limits, yet the field is far from cleared, and a rich and abun- 
dant harvest is still behind. It is an interesting, in truth, and 
an instructive speculation, to trace the steps, by which religion 
has been advanced into that present state of purity and pri- 
mitive excellence, which our own country numbers among its 
best titles of greatness and glory. Long was it before she was 
divorced from that monstrous wedlock, in which Paganizing 
Christians, and Christianizing Pagans, had linked her with the 
dreaming madness, on whose forehead the ignorance of an- 
tient and the courtesy of modern times have written the name 
of philosophy ; long was it before she was rescued from the 
dungeon, into which scholastic metaphysics had thrown her, 
and where, like the strength of Samson making sport for the 
revellers of Gaza, the ambassadress of heaven was compelled 
to write theses for schoolmen, and the oracle of truth to bab- 
ble the unintelligible jargon of Aristotle and Aquinas. She 
has been rescued from the pompous burthen of Roman Catho- 
lic superstition, and she has abdicated the throne, from which 
she was forced to fulminate her decrees against that science and 
philosophy, which bigotry first branded as her enemies, and 



11 

then bound hand and foot as fitting hecatombs for her revenge ! 
The proper sphere for religious investigation is now marked 
out, its records freed from extraneous matter, the laws of in- 
terpretation more clearly ascertained, its principles better elu- 
cidated, and the rubbish of pedantry, that once encumbered 
its surface, in a great measure, removed. Yet many truths 
still remain unascertained; many points are yet open to debate; 
and it must not be forgotten, that all our vantage ground has 
been gained, step by step, in defiance of prejudice, in opposi- 
tion to established opinion ; and that bold and original intellect, 
left to the exercise of its own powers, and free to submit all 
it examined to the test of reason, has been the instrument, by 
which so many advantages have been gained, and so many 
triumphs achieved. Yet, in inveterate defiance of all this, 
many an opinion is laughed to scorn, not because we have found 
it untrue, but because we prejudge it false, — not because reason 
rejects it, but because other times have not held it^ — or because 
the discovery is due to another and not to ourselves, — or be- 
cause we cherish that perversion of mind, which, jealous of 
its own opinions, feels it a degredation to assent even to truth, 
without a struggle, and seeks to prove to the world its inde- 
pendence of thought, by an obstinate defence of error. And 
lastly, there is another motive, which over some minds exerts 
no inconsiderable influence, and brings into the field many a 
competitor for controversial laurels, who had otherwise slept, 
in literary obscurity, indeed, but in undespised, because un- 
known imbecility ! There is a craving, not for fame, but for 
notoriety, — a petty restlessness of spirit, mistaken for the energy 
of genius, but, in truth, the ricketiness of an infirm under- 
standing, — with enough of reason to detect a fault, with enough 
of accuracy to spy out, microscopically, the flaws, and crevices, 
and unevenness, in a work of genius, but with a soul incapa- 
ble to feel its magnificence of execution, to estimate its sub- 
limity of design, or even to comprehend, within its scanty 
horizon, more than a segment of its vastness ! There is, more- 
over, such a thing as Quixotism in controversy, a knight-er- 



12 

rantry in theology, which sallies forth, with spear and shield, 
in search of adventures, in which to signalize its valour; finds 
or makes the castles, giants, and monsters, for which its ima- 
gination pants ; and tilts with all it meets, till, chastised into 
reason by some stronger hand, it returns, like the Knight of 
La Mancha, with broken armour and shattered limbs, with 
no comfort but that of good intentions, no guerdon but con- 
temptuous pity, to rue, in tears and solitude, the effects of its 
gratuitous extravagance ! 



13 



CHAPTER II. 

Infidel Objections — difficulty in encountering them — internal and 
external evidence. 

AN uninterested observer, unacquainted with the facts of 
the case, might be nearly justified in supposing, that, while 
so much strength was wasted within, all was peace and safety 
without, and that while so much pains were expended on the 
arrangement of its minutest and most inconsiderable parts, 
and so much importance set on the smallest of them, the great 
proportions of the Christian structure were settled beyond 
dispute, and its bulwarks manned and fortified beyond the 
danger of assault ! But from the first establishment of Chris- 
tianity up to the present moment, there have been but few pe- 
riods in which it has really had time for civil dissentions, and 
its watchful enemies have still contested its first principles, 
and almost reduced it to the anomalous necessity of proving its 
own existence. The terrors of temporal power, and the perse- 
cution of the sword, which barred its earlier progress, have 
not exhibited a more inveterate spirit of hostility than its later 
enemies who, from necessity rather than choice, have exchang- 
ed temporal weapons for the instruments of reason and argu- 
ment. The soft scepticism that scarce insinuates its doubt, 
the blasphemy that uplifts its unblushing front to Heaven, the 
far-drawn argument almost too subtle for the brain of the phi- 
losopher, the appeal that fires the passions of the multitude, 
the reasoner and the wit, the polished sarcasm and the rude 
philippic, splendid eloquence and contemptible ribaldry, minds 
of all tempers, from the wily sophist to the hot declaimer, and 
intellects of all calibres, from the genius whose very aberra- 
tions attest his strength of wing, to the drudge who plies his 
impure ministry among the very offals of impiety, those who 
sap and those who storm have all industriously wrought against 
the cause of Christianity. Nay, Atheism has kindled its tor- 



14 

pid, cold,, and passionless carcase into a portentous animation, 
that which teaches nothing has caught the zeal of a religious 
sect, the less than sceptic has become the more than bigot, 
and has sought to enthrone its desolate negation, its dumb and 
sightless abomination between the cherubim of the Most High ! 
But the spirit of Christianity has, notwithstanding, not been 
tamed by years, the emergency of the occasion has created the 
energies to meet it, the trumpet of the challenger has met with 
its defiance, and each succeeding generation has raised up a 
triumphant champion for itself! What was weak, has been 
strengthened; what was untenable, abandoned; what was 
doubtful made certain ; the threatened shame of the Church 
has proved its undisputed honor; and even on the score of ge- 
nius, long the boast of infidelity, the miracles of reason, the 
most godlike minds which the world has seen have been proud 
to rank among the humblest and most dutiful of her sons. 
Yet the evidences of Christianity, full and ample as they are, 
bear on them the undeniable stamp of a moral trial ; the same 
economical sufficiency of means, adapted to the two-fold pur- 
pose of satisfying the unbiassed reason, and leaving the will 
unforced, which runs throughout the whole of God's dispen- 
sations. It was well said by Pascal, that we must have faith 
before we can believe, and it is certain that a moral and pre- 
disposed state of the understanding, (a state in many minds 
most difficult of attainment,) is absolutely necessary for the 
proper consideration of the Christian evidences. So strong is 
the corrupted bias of our nature in the other direction, that we 
must desire that it may be true, before we can prove to our- 
selves that it is so ; we must take our shoes from off our feet, 
and feel that the ground whereon we stand is holy ground, 
before the Divine Presence will deign to convince our under- 
standing, or to move our heart ; it is not any one circumstance 
taken separately, but all circumstances collectively, it is not one 
fact by itself, but a thousand facts in connection, it is the 
piling of truth on truth, the vast accumulation of distinct evi- 
dences, heterogeneous, yet forming one consistence, flowing 
from different quarters, yet converging to one point, mingling, 



15 

crossing, strengthening each other, which combine into a body 
of moral proof, beneath the resistless weight of which all ob- 
jection and opposition sink into nothingness. Whether it arise 
from original nature, it matters not, but the fact is certain that, 
as different minds are influenced to action by different motives, 
so are they drawn to conviction by different kinds of evidence. 
Admirable then we must confess to be that variety of proof, in 
which are united, miracles and prophecy, the dazzling bright- 
ness of external witness, the soft persuasiveness of internal pu- 
rity, arguments to convince the intellect, hopes and fears to 
move the heart, the fulfilment of all the auguries of the imagi- 
nation, the satisfying of all the instinctive longings of our be- 
ing, all lifting up their voices, and, as it were, besieging our 
conviction, and scarcely leaving the wildest idiosyncrasy of 
mind without its appropriate testimony. Any one who is at 
all conversant with the history of infidelity, or who has had 
any occasion to reason with sceptics, must be aware that, when 
the loose and indefinite objections on which they rest can be 
reduced into a tangible shape, they arise either from a priori 
reasonings against a Revelation at all, or at least such a Reve- 
lation as Christianity claims to be, or from the difficulty of re- 
conciling to their notions of natural reason particular state- 
ments, whether facts or doctrines, contained in the records 
themselves. The first appeal, in most cases, to the majesty of 
God; the other, to the dignity of man — the one would make 
God too great to condescend to his creatures, the other his 
creatures too wise to submit their reason to God — the one, by 
denying the thing, exclude all evidence whatever — the other 
arraign the internal, and examine not the external evidence — 
the one boldly consistent — the other inconsistently bold. Both 
are impious, but one is illogical ! On the one hand, the at- 
tributes are cross-examined, if they accord not with the system 
of the questioner, and, as it were, convicted of perjury, their 
testimony excluded, and a new God, after their own hearts, 
created for the occasion ! On the other, the proper order of 
reasoning is reversed, and internal difficulties are held as de- 
cisive against the system, which, were they multiplied a 



16 

thousand-fold, would be absolutely nugatory as objections, so 
long as the external evidences remain whole and incontrovertible. 
The universal feelings and sentiments of mankind, however, 
in all ages and in all countries, are decisive in favour of the 
antecedent probability and credibility of a Revelation, as far 
as the mass of the human race are concerned ; and to the in- 
ductive reasoner on the government of the world, and the laws 
by which the divine administration is guided, the consummate 
harmony between natural and revealed religion, and the per- 
fect unity of design between the one system, which all allow 
to be from God, and the other, which likewise claims to be 
from him, as drawn out in the immortal work of Butler, afford 
a mass of irresistible evidence. We rise from the perusal of 
that wonderful effort of intellect not only with our antecedent 
prejudices banished, our a priori difficulties removed, and our 
paths made clear before us, but with such an impression of the 
reasonableness of Christianity, and its unison with our daily 
experience in the divine arrangement of things, that our unas- 
sisted reason seems almost capable of having anticipated the 
schemes of Providence, and able to have expanded the embryo 
system into the ample lineaments, and matured proportions of 
Revealed Truth! The observations of Pascal on the same sub- 
ject, are stamped with the same sublimity of conception and 
vividness of representation, which marks all that has come 
from the pen of that great genius, seem like Revelation illus- 
trating Revelation, and almost justify the remark of his modern 
eulogist, " that Providence cut him off, before his design was 
completed, lest the mysteries of Christianity should be render- 
ed too clear, for the moral probation of the intellect." The 
external evidences are those which, in the earlier ages of the 
Church, would in the nature of things, most excite attention, 
when the arm of Omnipotence was visibly stretched out to con- 
troul the course of nature, and afford such a manifestation of the 
divine original of the doctrine which it was intended to sup- 
port, as to throw into the shade all evidences of a less obtru- 
sive character. And even in every later period the direct and 
resistless force with which they prove the point at issue, and 



17 

the superior facilities with which such a mode of proof is pro- 
secuted, would throw a decided preponderance into their 
scale — not that the one is in reality, more conclusive than the 
other ; but we are more impressed by facts than doctrines, by 
the exhibition of power that strikes us, than by the display of 
wisdom, which our own efforts must enable us to penetrate. — 
For the first, moreover, a moderate degree only of judgment, 
diligence and ability are requisite to arrange the materials 
which are ready to our hands, whilst for the proper dev elope- 
ment of the other, so much of penetration, and sagacious ac- 
quaintance with all the bearings of the subject, so much in- 
sight into its connections with the varying complexities of hu- 
man motive and action, is absolutely indispensable, as, in one 
mind however eminently endowed, are seldom found united. 
To a mind indeed already imbued with the spirit of divine 
truth, every page of holy writ teems with confirmation to his 
faith, his heart and soul are prompt to echo back all that 
sounds in unison with them — and it demands neither talent, 
nor eloquence to urge them convincingly on a believing or pre- 
disposed audience. But to wrestle with an enemy, instead of 
going hand in hand with a friend, to move, not through the 
peace of an allied country, but the hostility of a debateable 
territory, to fight the sceptic with his own weapons, to retort, 
to his discomfiture, his own principles, to select a point which 
shall not appeal to a subtle understanding only, for that the 
infidel's sophistry will elude, nor to the heart, for that his feel- 
ings will belie, to throw it out in due relief from the sur- 
rounding surface, to render it so narrow as to bar es- 
cape into generalities, so wide as to make its conclusion em- 
brace the whole of which it is a part, this demands an effort of 
genius and a consummate skill in wielding the weapons of ar- 
gumentation, which are the attributes but of a favoured few ! 

To bring home to an unbeliever any proof of the divinity of 
our holy religion, from its internal construction, is a task more 
arduous indeed than would at first sight be imagined. The 
greater number of proofs generally urged are rather confirma- 
tory of the external evidence, than independent evidences in 

c 



18 

themselves, and too often seem, to a mind disposed to cavil, to 
involve a prejudging of the question, a real petitio principii on 
the point in debate. How strong an evidence of its origin, for 
instance, is the heavenly purity of the Christian morality, the 
sublimity of its doctrines, the practical beauty of its precepts, 
its adaptation to all the circumstances of life, its connexion 
with the common welfare of mankind ! — Yet urged as an un- 
connected evidence, powerful to strengthen, omnipotent to 
support, it still falls short of a perfect demonstration to prove 
its divinity. Theologians themselves, by too often making 
Christianity a mere republication of natural religion, have 
weakened its effect, and from incapacity or treachery pro- 
phaned the dignity of its commission ! So completely in 
unison with the interests of our own bosoms, is the full de- 
velopement of its moral system, that we are loth to allow, 
that that, which, when unfolded, is so evident to us to com- 
prehend, was above us to discover ; and that, though truly 
worthy of God, it was beyond the grasp of man. Famili- 
arity which strengthens the effect on the heart, lessens the 
wonder to the understanding, and as the glories of the mate- 
rial world could be duly appreciated by him only who, with 
rational faculties completely matured, should be at once intro- 
duced to their magnificence, so our dull and blunted faculties 
could then only be duly impressed with the heavenliness of 
the Christian morality, could they be led at one step from the 
twilight caverns of Pagan Philosophy into the broad day-light, 
and expanded firmament of the Christian Revelation! Col- 
lectively indeed, as we have before observed, the force of these 
evidences is irresistible, but separately they are incomplete; 
Each urges to farther inquiry, and each suggests that the 
whole system may be divine. But they fail of complete con- 
viction, until we know that it was indeed ushered and heralded 
immediately from above, that it trailed with it in its descent 
to the earth, a portion of its celestial glories, and that the tetra- 
grammaton of Jehovah, the undoubted and miraculous signet 
of the Most High was visibly stamped upon its nativity. But 
let us not be supposed to depreciate the value, or to underrate 



19 

the importance of the internal evidence. They have in many 
respects a decided advantage over the others ; and though, in 
defiance of general opinion, we cannot admit that time, beyond 
a certain and ascertainable point, progressively weakens the 
historical testimony, yet a strong effort is required to throw 
ourselves into past events, and to bring them vividly before 
the eye of the mind. The external evidences, on the contrary, 
are ever before us, fixed, abiding, unchangeable ; they appeal 
to facts and laws in the nature of things, which every man can 
appreciate; and whilst in the first case, the conclusion is self- 
evident, and the premises alone demand proof, in this, the 
premises are granted, the facts are admitted, and the conclu- 
sion only which you would draw from them, is the subject of 
debate. These remarks apply of course to the whole of re- 
vealed religion collectively, to the Jewish and Christian Dis- 
pensation considered as parts of the same great plan. They 
hang indissolubly together ; their soul and spirit is one, the 
genius of neither is fully intelligible without a knowledge of 
both ; the Christian must admit the Divine Commission of 
Moses, and, though the prejudices of the Jew in favour of the 
perfection of the latter forbids his acceptance of the former, 
yet to the unbeliever any proof of the divinity of the elder 
covenant, will almost resistlessly force upon him that of the 
later Dispensation. On the subject of internal evidence, no 
one has taken a bolder or more authoritative position than the 
author of the Divine Legation of Moses, Demonstrated ; none 
has selected a point of internal proof more free from the objec- 
tions which have been stated, and in the abundant use which 
he makes of the Christian Scriptures to prove his principal 
position in respect to the genius of the Jewish, none is more 
deeply engaged in the evidence in support of both. A com- 
plete discussion of the subject demands a degree of theological 
knowledge, which nothing but long years of study and masterly 
genius could supply ; its most subordinate parts afford room 
for volumes, and the disputes in the Christian world to which 
it has given rise open a boundless field for instructive specula- 
tion. To notice the principal features of this celebrated work 



20 

is all that is attempted here ; and even this has rendered ne- 
cessary a multitude of preliminary remarks on the spirit of 
religious controversy, and the Christian evidences in general, 
which nothing but the intimate bearing they have on the body 
of the subject, hardly intelligible without them, could perhaps 
have justified. For the very title of the work suggests to the 
mind a vague idea of doubt and difficulty, and the name of 
Warburton has become but another appellation for paradox, 
and the strongest synonyme of theological controversy ! 



21 



CHAPTER III. 

General character of Warburton's genius — as exemplified in his 
great work — general reflections on the matter and style of the 
Divine Legation — as a literary production. 

IN whatever light we regard the Divine Legation, it must 
be received as an astonishing production, a phenomenon to 
which the whole extent of our literature scarce affords a paral- 
lel, a master-piece which gives its author a just and undoubted 
title to immortality. At this distance of time, when the 
mingled wonder and terror, with which its first appearance was 
marked, have subsided into calmness, when the mists with 
which party spirit has involved it, have in some degree been 
dissipated, and we can now view, without the idolatry of dis- 
ciples, or the bitterness of rivals, this greatest monument of a 
genius that has passed away, whatever may be the judgment 
given on the opinions which it perpetuates, the extraordinary 
talents which planned and completed it, are universally con- 
fessed. And now that it is no longer thought necessary to im- 
pugn the principles of the writer, when we no longer see he- 
resy in every opinion, thwart his reasonings when undeniable, 
or charge him with wilful error when wrong, the most eccen- 
tric theories of Warburton may be contemplated with a more 
kind and indulgent eye. The wild sallies of a restless imagina- 
tion, rather than the errors of a perverted reason, they spring 
more from the ambition to discover truth in a new direction, than 
a desire to overthrow it in. an old one, from the consciousness of 
strength that will only wrestle with what is difficult, than the 
perverseness that will only display itself in advocating what is 
false — not from the longing to deceive, but from a passion to 
dazzle, surprise, and to confound. The whole mind of War- 
burton was formed on a gigantic model j its powers and its 
passions were both raised above the general scale of human 



22 

nature, and all alike betokened an extraordinary man. He was 
one of those intellects, which are occasionally raised up to show 
the growth which the human faculties may attain ; intellects 
which are all things to themselves; which defy calculation, 
and belie experience ; which shake, in the waywardness of 
their motions, the existing order of things ; make or overturn 
systems ; found sects or dynasties ; religions or heresies, and 
form eras and epochs in history and science ; intellects born to 
rule, to reform, or to destroy ; that shine with auspicious light, 
or dazzle with disastrous splendour ; and, as times and circum- 
stances may direct their course, become the curses or the bles- 
sings of mankind. Self-formed and self-created, the turbulence 
of his passions unchastened by society, the originality of his 
mind unschooled by any master, with powers boundless as his 
ambition, and self-confidence equal to both, ardent to conceive 
and industrious to execute, with abilities too vast for subordina- 
tion, yet a temper too tyrannical to command, Warburton, in 
whatever sphere he had moved, would have stood preeminently 
first, thwarted, opposed, hated, yet fixed in undoubted supre- 
macy. In times of civil discord, he would have been the head 
of a domineering faction j in a period of religious repose, he 
became a theological despot ; with a spirit of opposition in his 
very obedience, the champion of the Divine Legation arro- 
gantly prescribed to the cause he upheld the means of defence ; 
creative even in upholding what exists, the author of the 
Union between Church and State, seems the founder and legis- 
lator of both ; he speculated in theology with all the freedom 
of literature ; he dogmatized in literature with all the exclu- 
siveness of theology ; absolute even in his affections, he exacted 
obedience before he requited love, and his friendship was but 
the protection of a superior ; terrible in his vengeance, he in- 
timidated the fearful, he crushed the weak, and hurled scorn 
and defiance on the strong ; till loved and hated, adored and 
calumniated, the pillar of his mighty mind gave way under 
excess of excitement, and the author of the Divine Legation 
sunk into idiotcy and a premature grave — bequeathing his 
faults to his enemies, his virtues to his friends, and his immor- 



23 

tality to a just posterity. Endowed with the highest attributes 
of the sublimest genius, those lesser faculties, which would 
have been conspicuous in an inferior mind, are but satellites to 
the master powers of his ; and his poignant wit and playful 
fancy are lost in the overshadowing predominance of creative 
vigor, boundless imagination, and consummate reason. His 
imagination and reason traverse with matched and equal steps 
the wide ground of his speculations— his reason supports his 
imagination, his imagination prompts his reason — the first gives 
consistency to chimeras, palpable substance to airy nothings ; 
the last volatilizes truth, and gives a wildness to the most solid 
argumentation. With a reason less robust, he had been a vi- 
sionary enthusiast, with an imagination less vivid, he had been 
a dry metaphysician — with both, tamed down from their su- 
perfluous strength, he had been a more correct and a more use- 
ful writer — with both as they are, he is a wonderful man, an 
irregular but stupendous genius. Ordinary minds fail through 
their weakness, great ones are ruined by their strength. See- 
ing his point vividly, Warburton looked on it till he was daz- 
zled ; wishing to give it prominence on the canvass, he gave it 
monopoly ; penetrating and profound, fit to dive to the centre 
of things, where others fell short, he went beyond ; where 
others sought reason on the surface, he dragged systems from 
the abyss, till the able expounder of a particular scheme dege- 
nerated into a trafficker in theories. But the perversion of their 
powers is the original sin of exalted minds ; the very fire 
which gives a supernatural vigor to their motions, tempts them 
into an eccentric orbit ; and the essential impetuosity, on whose 
wings they shoot forward in the race, gives or seems to give 
them an irregularity, which duller and better poised spirits 
never exhibit. In the theatre of active life, there are not want- 
ing examples of men whose minds are all spirit and energy 
and enterprize ; who feed their craving for action on the tur- 
bulent excitement of ambition ; who pine in peace ; who lan- 
guish in repose; find in the ordinary employments of mankind 
a living death, and seek in those rocks and waves and tem- 
pests, in which the more weak or unskilful are ship-wrecked, 



24 

o 

the native elements of their minds. In like manner, in the in- 
tellectual world, are minds cast in that energetic mould, whose 
very being is their activity, and who are scarcely conscious of 
existence, but in those violent exercises, which call into action 
all the nerves, and muscles of their intellectual frame ; who 
find or make fit employment for themselves, and, like War- 
burton and Bayle, pervading human nature at a glance, seek 
in the region of paradox room for the enlargement of their un- 
wearied faculties. Such was Warburton, and the Divine Le- 
gation bears from beginning to end, the evidence ( of its origi- 
nal ; it is the genuine and legitimate offspring of such a mind, 
with all the features of its parent, its strength and weakness, 
its beauties and deformities, its boldness and extravagances in- 
delibly engraven on it. 

It seldom happens, that theological works can display that 
combination of rare qualities which can raise them to the high- 
est rank in general literature, or exalt their authors to those 
niches which the voice of the world reserves for the statues of 
first rate genius alone. They may exhibit learning the most 
profound, research the most extensive, acuteness in exposing 
error, logical precision in urging truth, wit may sharpen their 
antitheses, fancy glitter in their illustrations, the living soul of 
eloquence thunder and lighten in their periods ! But there are 
inherent and peculiar difficulties to cope withal, there is a tech- 
nicality, a peculiar and unaccommodating spirit; a narrowness 
of subject, a something unfriendly to that creative and origi- 
nal power, that incommunicable attribute of genius, invention, 
which lays an interdict on them all, and forbids them from 
mixing, in familiar brotherhood, with the great masters of the 
human mind. The happy choice of the subject, and still more 
felicitous course of argument which he has selected, has res- 
cued the great work of Warburton from this disadvantage ; 
and the consequence has been, that it belongs not to Divinity, 
but to literature ; not to theologians, but to all who think or 
read ; not to one generation, but to all ; not to his own country, 
but to the world ! Never did a master hand elaborate a com- 
position of more consummate mechanism ; there is a simplicity 



25 

and variety of design, a unity and yet a diversity, a harmony 
in the whole and a multiplicity in the parts, an extension of 
subject and a compression of matter, an union of seeming con- 
tradictions, and an attainment of apparent impossibilities which 
mock panegyric, and make praise lag behind. Not winding 
his way to truth through the labyrinths of reasoning, but 
flashing on it from intuition, the wonder at the penetration 
that could so discover, sinks in admiration of the industry that 
could so unfold ; neither overpowered by vastness, nor bewil- 
dered by complexity, he comprehended whilst he analysed, he 
analysed whilst he comprehended. When we contemplate the 
Divine Legation our ideas of great and small are confounded, 
and our measure of magnitude enlarged. Like a stupendous 
building, in the adaptation and symmetry that reign through- 
out, our own minds are expanded into the elevation of the 
scene before us, it is itself our whole horizon, and, in the ex- 
clusion of all objects else from our view, all estimate and com- 
parison are lost. It is by setting it by the side of other under- 
takings, that, in the society of dwarfs, its colossal height is 
discovered; if we look at the whole, we overlook its parts, 
they too in their own greatness occupy the whole sphere of 
vision ; each portion of the work is itself a work, perfect and 
complete in itself, a world in a system of worlds, each admi- 
rable in itself, yet gravitating towards a common centre, and 
made more admirable still in that relation. Genius has here 
tasked itself to a work of supererogation, and each book of 
this great production had been enough to achieve its author's 
immortality. Still its whole effect is certainly more to astonish 
than to convince ; we read it as we do an epic poem ; we enter 
on it with feelings wound up into painful expectation ; we 
proceed with avidity, and tremble with impatience to dart to 
the consummation of the plot ; but, as we advance, the in- 
terest thickens, new characters crowd around us, strange 
events startle us ; sometimes we hurry along on the high road 
of the narrative, at others we are led aside into episodes, and 
repose pur languishing fancy in their wild and romantic mag- 
nificence, till we dream away all memory of our original ob- 



26 

ject ; and when, at some sudden turn, it bursts upon us, we 
sigh and fling away our task with no definable impression, 
with a confounded sense of wonder, pleasure, and disappoint- 
ment, with an exhausted attention, a dazzled imagination, and 
a distracted brain. Yet great as is the length of the Divine 
Legation, its vigour never flags ; its author never nods ; the 
elasticity and youthfulness of genius, its prodigality of strength, 
its light and airy step, are evident throughout ; the very ex- 
tremities are warm with the same blood that circulates about 
the heart ; every atom is instinct with vitality ; every frag- 
ment, quick with spirit, and the whole is pervaded with the 
same resistless splendour, inexhaustible invention, and inex- 
tinguishable fire ! This perhaps is one of its greatest praises, 
and is, indeed, one to which a work of such an extent can so 
seldom make good a claim, that an exemption from the un- 
evennesses, the alternate risings and sinkings to which works 
of genius are chartered, is sufficient, in itself, to stamp the 
extraordinary mind of its author. Branching, as his subject 
does, far and wide, encumbered with innumerable difficulties, 
involving him in war witli enemies the most formidable, he 
has traced all those ramifications, removed those obstacles, 
overcome those adversaries ! The Divine Legation, in its pre- 
sent form, wears war on its front — it is built on the wrecks 
and ruins of other systems, and becoming the tomb of its op- 
ponents, has incorporated their remains into its own substance ; 
like those rocks which have included in their formation the 
bones and organic remains of the former world, out of whose 
destruction they are said to have sprung. It is possible, in- 
deed, that some part of its spirit may be attributable to this 
cause, that its edge is sharpened by controversy, its mettle 
kindled by incessant opposition, and the current of the work 
chafed and roughened into strength by the obstacles that op- 
posed its passage — yet this, while it diminishes the wonder 
which the buoyant interest of the Divine Legation naturally 
excites, only adds to the blended versatility and vigour of those 
talents which only sought refreshment in a change of labour, 
expanded the surface without lessening the depth of their at- 



27 

tainments, turned the arms that opposed them into trophies, 
and rifling the most distant regions of the intellectual world, 
made their productions, not the mere luxuries, but the neces- 
saries of their subject. The Divine Legation is indeed the 
store-house into which all the treasures of Warburton's reading 
have been prodigally accumulated — no economy of authorities, 
no calculated sufficiency of learning — but a vast encyclopedia 
of universal knowledge. Leaving to others to cultivate par- 
ticular spots, and to dream that the mountains, which bounded 
their little vallies, were the horizon of the mental world, the 
ambition of Warburton has here grasped at universal domi- 
nion ! Making the elegancies of ancient and modern litera- 
ture the light toys of his leisure, he fearlessly grappled with 
the abstruseness of both, boldly flung himself into the chaos 
of ancient metaphysics, groped a perilous way through the 
darkness of their abortive systems, and, alternately, the his- 
torian of philosophy, and the philosopher of history, the hap- 
py expounder of fables, and the fabulist of simple facts, the 
unfolder of mysteries, and the perverter of evident meanings, 
scholar, disputant, and divine, his reasoning confounds us, 
where it does not convince ; his imagination dazzles, where 
his reasoning fails ; and his information astonishes, where his 
reasoning is unmarked, and his imagination unfelt. Yet with 
all his learning, his mind was much too vigorous for pedantry ; 
it is multifarious without confusion, it is immense without cum- 
brousness. That which to another would have been an intel- 
lectual plethory, was converted in him into the healthful 
juices of his mind — that which, to others, would have en- 
cumbered the surface of the understanding, was melted and 
incorporated into itself, by the active fire of his ! 

Perhaps Warburton was less fitted for the exercise of verbal 
criticism, than for that of any other faculty, which the manifold 
objects of his work called into active exertion. It demanded a 
calmness, which the impetuosity of the man disturbed — an 
impartiality, which the interest of the theorist refused — a mi- 
nuteness of knowledge, which the wide pursuits of the general 
scholar precluded. The inventive faculty was so strong as to 



28 

disturb the exercise of the judgment, and alternately influenc- 
ing and influenced by the passion for system, proceeded to 
give a form, a roundness, and a consistence to the most mangled 
and unconnected fragments ; a perfection which, while it 
amuses as a hypothesis, startles as a datum for reasoning, and, 
admirable as imagination, becomes absolutely unwarrantable as 
criticism. Yet let us not withhold even here the full admira- 
tion, which the unrivalled talents of the theorist demand. It 
is true that, like a sculptor, who from the leg or arm of an 
antique statue, should pretend to restore the original figure, 
complete it and title it • or like a painter, who should colour 
up the dim outlines of an old fresco into the grouping of a 
finished picture, Warburton evokes full-limbed systems out of 
slight or indifferent facts, and holds up his own creation, as the 
figure certain, and undoubted, of long-lost truth ; yet such is 
the power of the magician, that the understanding sinks, al- 
most without resistence, into the arms of the imagination, and, 
though the coldness of returning reason disdains the illusion, 
yet, while the spell is on us, we gaze, it is true, with a convic- 
tion that is half incredulity, but with an incredulity that is 
more than half conviction, on the shadows that are so like rea- 
lity. But there are subjects not a few, where, without imagin- 
ation, the mere power of argument would avail nothing — where 
the happiest conjecturer has the best chance of success, and 
the ablest theorist is most likely to find his hypothesis borne 
out by substantial facts. Fortunately for Warburton, though 
his principal theory should be disputed, yet more than one of 
his subordinate hypotheses is supported by an accumulation of 
proof, a fertility, closeness, and strength of argument, and, in 
one case at least, by an eloquency of appeal to the laws and 
instincts of the human mind, as developed by the expression of 
its movements in language and writing, that cavil is silenced, 
and scepticism itself surprised into approbation. The essays 
on picture writing, and the mysteries, and, above all, the for- 
mer, are as brilliant efforts, as genius in its happiest moments, 
ever produced ; and Warburton is no where greater, than 
when he carries the torch into the very cell of the Eleusinian 



29 

Temple, and darting through all the clouds which time, sophis- 
try, ignorance, and learning, had industriously flung over the 
history of hieroglyphics ; becomes the interpreter, and, as it 
were, the prophet of the past ; instructs the antients in the 
meaning of their own inventions ; teaches the moderns the 
progress of the antients by the history of their own ; cuts at a 
stroke the knot which both had conspired to tie, converts mys- 
tery into simplicity, and what seemed audacious paradox into 
self-evident truth. Such were the advantages and disadvant- 
ages of this characteristic of Warburton's genius — at home in 
difficulties — at a loss, in simplicities — a dangerous interpreter 
where cool investigation is demanded — a consummate guide 
where a searching stroke of genius is required — a high autho- 
rity where the solution of some dark question is at stake — a 
treacherous master where general rules for theological investiga- 
tion are at issue. But that the Divine Legation will ever have 
such an effect is little to be dreaded ; the immediate school of 
Warburton, the satellites that reflected his greatness, have long 
since died away, and, generally speaking, the divines of the 
present day are more inclined to gaze aloof on the strange phe- 
nomenon, and allow it to blaze, unapproached, than to catch 
the sparks that issue from it, or fill their censers from its unhal- 
lowed fire. Indeed none but a mind of kindred powers could 
venture to tread the path which Warburton has traversed with 
so firm and vigorous a step ; his arms and weapons are those 
of a giant, would overwhelm, with their weight, a frame 
less robust, and are better fitted to be hung up for the gaze of 
curiosity, than worn for actual service. Yet when we consider 
the boldness and extent of the undertaking, there is greater 
reason to wonder at its general success, than at its partial fail- 
ures, and to congratulate the cause which he has advocated on 
those exhaustless resources, and unparalleled combination of 
talents which could alone have triumphed in an argument 
which, from its novelty, would have daunted the timid, and, 
from its difficulty, have overwhelmed the feeble. It is the pe- 
culiar prerogative of genius that there is always something to 
redeem its worst errors ; there is that adaptation and natural 



30 

sympathy between its constitution and general truth, which 
brings them almost irresistibly together — its very fantasies are 
more valuable than the sober reasonings of others — it may not 
be completely right, but it can scarcely ever be utterly wrong. 
And such was the case with this extraordinary man, in whose 
mind, as in all men of first rate abilities, there was an energetic 
vigour of reasoning, a strong, piercing, and available good 
sense, which provided ample ballast to that power of imagina- 
tion, which, whilst in others it would have first dissolved and 
then borne away the whole frame, was only the plumes and 
the wings to the mind of Warburton. Whilst therefore it is 
for the enemies of his fame to weigh every error in the balance, 
to calculate the exact depth of his falls, and to exult in that 
perversion which warped to a certain degree, all his faculties, 
no attentive and unbiassed reader of the Divine Legation can 
do otherwise than allow, that there is no perversion without in- 
dubitable marks of the better power, no fault that does not 
claim alliance with an excellence ; that in the controversalist there 
is still the air of a genuine searcher for truth, and in the theorist 
the stamp of a logical and accurate reasoner ; nor ought our 
censure to visit, with loose and indiscriminate severity, even 
that tone of irony, overbearing pride and arrogant contempt, 
which run through many portions of the Divine Legation. — 
Never was a production of great, and acknowledged merit, of 
eccentric, but undoubted ability, greeted with a less favourable 
reception than that work ; all its enemies, without sharing the 
talents, caught the exaggerated passions of its author — male- 
volence without an atom of charity, misrepresentation with- 
out truth, criticism without discrimination, fixed on it at once 
as their common prey. Churchmen and dissenters, the infidel 
and the christian advocate, the dogmatist and the sceptic, the 
haters of paradox and the lovers of truth, were startled from 
their security by the fearless speculatist, caught the spirit of 
theological hatred, sounded, far and wide, the trumpet of an 
exterminating crusade, and banded their motley and discordant 
phalanx against the common enemy. 

Planning his design in retirement, and building, in silence 



31 

and obscurity, the monument of his future greatness, Warbur- 
ton was ushered, in a moment, into the tumult and contention 
of the literary arena ; having added, as he thought, a new and 
impregnable bulwark to the Christian faith, he was branded, 
by its old defenders, as a traitor and renegade to its legitimate 
defence ; the vindicator of the rights, and expounder of the 
privileges of the Church, he was laid under the ban, as an in- 
novator, and his aid rejected, as an adventurer ; conscious of 
upright intentions, and sensible of vast abilities, he saw the 
one calumniated and the other despised ; an orthodox believer 
and a logical reasoner, he was treated as half heretic, half 
sophist ; his opinions were held in horror, as the adulterate 
coinage of the one, and his reasonings in contempt, as the 
flimsy cobwebs of the other. Warburton had not the meek- 
ness that shunned polemic contention, like Newton, nor the 
irresolution that shrunk disheartened from his task, like Cud- 
worth ; gifted with much of the genius of the former, and all 
the learning of the latter, and more than the self-confidence of 
both, his natural overbearingness chafed by resistance, and his 
pride irritated by competition, he roused himself to crush what 
he deemed the hornets that stung him, turned the talents 
which he had employed in the defence of religion to the vindi- 
cation of his fame, and the arms with which he had assailed 
the enemies of the common faith, against the detractors of his 
own — nor in truth, however we may condemn, ought we to be 
surprised at the acrimonious spirit, which tinctures the contro- 
versial writings of such a man as Warburton, when we see the 
unjustifiable excesses into which Lowth, his only adequate 
antagonist, was hurried by the heat of discussion, and the fury 
of debate. Still less at the contempt, with which he treats the 
swarm of inferior adversaries with whom it was his fate to 
contend, when we remember among them such writers as 
Webster, Tillard, Morgan, and Bate, men who may be ranked 
foremost in the pestilent tribe of answerers by profession, and 
who derive their only title to distinction from the light, with 
which the vengeance of some distinguished opponent illumi- 
nates the obscurity of their names. It was, moreover, the 



32 

peculiar destiny of the Divine Legation, that it was not merely 
the principal argument of the work, and the theories which 
form its main support, which excited public attention, and 
called forth animadversion and controversy, but almost every 
incidental remark on any subject of interest was dignified by 
its own peculiar answer, and boasts its own appropriate attack 
and defence. The strictures, which, in the dedication to his 
work, Warburton has strongly and forcibly made on the abuse 
of ridicule, in the dispute between Christianity and Freethink- 
ers, were combated by Akenside, and the successful poet of 
the imagination became the feeble advocate of the philosopher 
of the characteristics ; a few remarks, on the action of the 
same propensities of the human mind, in the genius of Heathen 
and Papal superstition, were assailed by the acute pen of 
Middleton, and the short introductory remarks on the compa- 
rative importance of internal and external evidence were 
thought worthy of a public animadversion by a Prelate of the 
Established Church. 

If such be the fair allowances, and such the fair palliations, 
which that intolerant and overbearing temper towards oppo- 
nents of the same faith, which is deemed so peculiar to War- 
burton, justly demands, still less founded in truth and reason 
are objections raised against the same spirit, as displayed in 
every page of his writings towards the infidel and sceptical 
authors, in the refutation of whose opinions so large a portion 
of his work is employed. On general subjects of literary dis- 
putation, in the serious and sober discussion of the principles 
of religion, natural and revealed, still more in the examina- 
tion of other points, which, however interesting and impor- 
tant, are yet not essential, and fairly admit even of a wide 
difference in sentiment and opinion, a regard alike to the in- 
terests of truth, public utility, and personal respect exacts, as 
a duty, the observance of courtesy and indulgent kindness. 
But on subjects, where the disputants must be as far asunder 
as earth from heaven, where the features of hostility are too 
broad for any mask of conventional hypocrisy to conceal, woe 
to the fastidiousness that would emasculate the voice of manly 



33 

feeling into the effeminacy of ill-placed delicacy ! It is for the 
sceptic, to whom all things, but the privilege to doubt, are 
indifferent, to balance phrases, and measure to a hair the nice- 
ties of etiquette ; but to the Christian advocate, whose feelings 
are outraged at the same moment that his reason is offended, 
the tone of indignation is that which nature prescribes, and 
which good taste, her faithful follower, will never condemn. 

Where others are the defenders of religion, Warburton 
stands forth as her self-invited champion — others wait the as- 
sault, he carries far and wide the fire and sword of an invader 
— others assert the superiority, he the majesty of truth — others 
treat infidelity with the abhorrence of a honest heart, he with 
the contempt of a commanding intellect- — others have attacked 
it with separate powers, with acuteness, with learning, with 
eloquence, Warburton with them all combined, has fulminated 
his vengeance on its head with the concentrated powers of 
genius. There is something bold, and almost sublime, in the 
dedication of this work to the freethinkers ; something start- 
ling in the insulting confidence with which he summons those, 
whose systems he has overturned, to witness their own ruin, 
and try and handle the instruments of their own overthrow. 
Nothing is more admirable than the vigour with which this 
intellectual giant wrestles with infidelity, wherever it presents 
an assailable front ; than the skill with which he hunts the 
fleeting sophistry through all its doublings, drags it from its 
den, and makes it unlink, coil by coil, its noxious length; 
nothing more daring than the courage with which he gives a 
stability to the Protean fallacy, only to bind it fast ; a shape to 
the mist-like ambiguity, only to overthrow it ; nothing more 
eloquent than the indignation with which he tramples on the 
evil spirit with which he contends, whether it lurks in the 
shape of a reptile, or, like Milton's archangel, wears somewhat 
of obscured greatness, whether it dazzles in the eloquence of 
Bolingbroke, or disgusts in the ribaldry of Toland ; nothing 
more imposing than the strength, with which he strips every 
covering from the deformed error, and holds it up, in its na- 
tive nakedness, to the scorn and derision of the world. Such 

D 



34 

then are the principal characteristics of Warburton's intellec- 
tual and moral temperament as suggested by the Divine Lega- 
tion, and which are the stronger, as never author impressed 
on every page more decided marks of his peculiarities — and 
such are the most distinguished appearances which are ex- 
hibited by that celebrated work. The style, in which it is 
written, is well worthy of the subject, and though formed, as 
his biographer tells us, on the professed study of rhetorical 
rules, it bears all the features of unweakened originality, and 
is indeed, in an eminent degree, characteristic of its author's 
mind. Flowing without diffuseness, concise without obscurity, 
it expresses obvious ideas simply, subtle thoughts precisely, 
great thoughts nobly, and all, idiomatically and purely. Dis- 
daining all the coxcombry of style, it has all the free graces 
which manly elegance can give ; without affected antithesis, 
it abounds in striking contrasts j and, with a certain splendid 
economy of words, runs on in a stream, always clear, always 
strong, often rapid, impetuous, and overbearing, and coloured 
every now and then by the sudden gleams of an imagination 
of singular vividness and intensity ! 



35 



CHAPTER IV. 

Argument of the Divine Legation stated — doctrine of future 
reward and punishment how far necessary to Society — How 
Warbur ton s first Proposition is to be limited. 

NOR does the principal theory of the work come before us 
with circumstances less imposing than its splendid accessories ; 
it bears novelty on its front, boldness in it enunciation, de- 
monstration in its results. It courts not persuasion, but exacts 
conviction ; it shelters not its weakness under the wing of pro- 
bability, nor its modesty under the favourable construction of 
its readers, but arrogates to its shape the precision of a logical 
syllogism, and to its evidence the certainty of a mathematical 
theorem. To its apparent novelty the character of the author 
would in itself be ample testimony, avowing, as he does, that 
floating aloof from the high-road of established opinion, he 
sought, far and wide, in the boundless relations of things, for 
undiscovered evidence ; its real novelty is abundantly proved 
by the terror which the appearance of the bold stranger struck 
into the minds of his contemporaries, and however evident the 
propositions, which are the pillars of his hypothesis, may have 
separately appeared to other writers who had turned their 
attention to the subject, the connexion between the two facts 
and its resulting consequences is, undoubtedly, the sole disco- 
very of Warburton. 

That civil society must be dissolved, unless the doctrine of 
a future state of rewards and punishments binds its elements 
together, and supplies from the terrors, which are treasured up 
in another world, motives to virtue which this cannot hold forth, 
and that, if any society can be shown to exist without it, the 
absence of such belief necessarily implies an immediate inter- 
position of Providence ; that, moreover, such doctrines are not 
to be found in, nor did make part of the Mosaic Dispensation, 
are the two great propositions, which are asserted in the Divine 



36 

Legation. That a future state was not to be found in the law, had 
been long urged by infidel writers as a decisive proof against 
the divine commission of the Hebrew Lawgiver, and the Apolo- 
gists of Revelation fully conceding the great principle of their 
opponents, had been employed, by every art of theological in- 
genuity, in eliciting the doctrine in question from the Mosaic 
records ; and having predetermined that, in whatever disguise 
it lurked, it ought to be discoverd there, retorted the assertion 
of their adversaries, and maintained that it did really form an 
integral sanction of the Jewish law. Such was the state of 
the argument when it was taken up by Warburton, in whose 
hands it assumed an appearance totally different from its for- 
mer state. He did not, like his predecessors, put the Penta- 
teuch to the rack, to extort from its unwilling lips the answer 
which he was resolved to have, nor attempt to clothe an unten- 
able assertion in shreds and patches of scripture texts, but al- 
lowing to its fullest extent the proposition of his infidel oppo- 
nents, denies the conclusion which they would draw from it, 
fights them with their own weapons, accepts their challenge on 
their own conditions, and from the omission of the doctrine 
professes to draw the divinity of the Legation. In the former 
state of the question, the common ground between sceptics and 
divines was the necessary and indispensible connection between, 
a divine revelation, and the inculcation, as a sanction, of a future 
state of reward and punishment, in the present, the omission of 
that doctrine by Moses — in the first, the defender of the Mosaic 
mission undertook to prove, that the mark of divinity in ques- 
tion really belonged to the law ; in the latter case, to show 
against one party, that the omission was real, and that the in- 
fidel was correct in his assertion ; against the other, that, by the 
consent of all nations, the omission could be supplied only by 
immediate aid from heaven, and against both, that it was not 
derogatory to the divine dignity of a revelation that it should 
rest its sanctions on temporal blessings and curses. Nor is this 
the whole of the question which the author has undertaken to 
prove ; for each of his propositions is burthened by an addition, 
entailing as much difficulty as the principal questions ; and not 



37 

only the omission of the doctrine of Moses, but its ignorance 
by the Jews ; not only the existence of an extraordinary but of 
an equal providence to particulars, seem considered by himself 
as important, and, by his adversaries, as absolutely essential to 
his theory. 

That a belief in a future state of rewards and punishments 
is necessary to the well-being of civil society, is the first propo- 
sition, which the author of the Divine Legation undertakes to 
prove. In the state of things under which we ourselves are 
placed, our mental vision is cleared from its natural films, the 
end and relations of our being are written before us, as with a 
sunbeam, and the voice of the preacher, day after day ringing in 
our ears, renders the thought of eternity and all its tremendous 
progeny of sorrows and joys, familiar things, connate ideas in- 
separable from our moral and intellectual constitution. The 
proposition in question, therefore, appears a self-evident truth, 
and yet, if closely examined, it will seem neither so undoubted, 
nor so precise, nor so exactly squared to the conclusions deduced 
from it, as a first sight could suggest it to be. For just so far 
only as the belief in a state of future reward and punishment 
is absolutely necessary to social existence, and no further, will 
the omission of the doctrine demonstrate the substitution in its 
place of a superior and supernatural agency. It is undoubted 
indeed, that to the perfection of society, to such a moulding of 
its constituent parts as shall at once ensure the greatest possible 
good to individuals and to the whole, the doctrine in question 
is absolutely essential. But the existence of a thing, or a con- 
stitution of things in its best possible state, and its existence in 
a certain degree only of excellence, the ordinary lot of humanity, 
are evidently distinct, and the confusion between these two 
ideas has certainly led Warburton to press this point further 
than strictness of reasoning will justify him in doing. In the 
account which he has given of the origin of society, there is 
not that distinctness either of thought or of expression which 
usually characterizes his manner, and, like most writers on the 
subject, he is confused in accounting for the origin of that 
which we know to have been coeval with the human race, to 



38 

have arisen necessarily from the constitution of their nature on 
one hand, and their relative situation in regard to those around 
them on the other. To speak of a state of natural independence 
farther than is necessary to adjust the theory of social and per- 
sonal rights is plainly a hypothetical assumption, not a fact. — 
Society, in strictness of speech, was framed originally neither 
for the sake of being (rov wou) nor of well-being, (tov w «vat) 
existence or profit, but arising necessarily from the consitution 
of things, was afterwards continued, regulated, and perfected 
for the sake of both. To this regulated state, where the duties 
and prerogatives of the magistrate are ascertained with tolera- 
ble exactness, and where necessity and experience have given 
some order and arrangement to the rules to be observed for its 
defence, as such an arrangement is the result of compact, and 
compact is the essence of social union as it now exists, the term 
civil society, with the above reservation as to its commence- 
ment, is with propriety applied. Such a society, as far as its 
compact goes, consists in checking, by appropriate punish- 
ments, the inroads of self-love on the security of the person or 
property of others. Temporal terrors are the instruments 
which it employs, and as it calls those into action, only because 
religion, which had an antecedent and independent existence, 
was inadequate to the task, and, as it exercises them without 
any reference whatever to a tribunal in another world, the fun- 
damental principles of the social union, as far as they are enforc- 
ed on offenders, who will always be the minority in a state, are 
beyond doubt independent of future punishment and reward. 
But it may be said, that the great majority in a state, on whom 
the hand of the law does not fall, are influenced in their 
judgment and observance of the duties, the infringement of 
which they condignly visit, by the doctrine, which in the other 
case was, confessedly, of no effect or service whatever. But 
this would scarcely be the case, should their belief have no di- 
rect bearing on those acts which are prejudicial or otherwise to 
society, and still less so, should it directly encourage and imme- 
diately sanction the breach of many laws which are conducive 
to its welfare, and absolutely essential to its perfection. This 



39 

will be the more readily confessed, should it appear, on examina- 
tion, that even the duties of imperfect obligation which are more 
peculiarly the province of religion to enforce, may, to a very 
considerable extent, be observed and practised without the aid 
in question. It is difficult and impossible to measure the exact 
influence of any principle which, like religion, issues its edicts 
from the chambers of the heart, and exercises its dominion, 
unheard, and unseen ; but a slight glance at the genius and 
effects of paganism will be more than enough to show us how 
feeble was its power to check vice, encourage virtue, or estab- 
lish the substantial interests of society ! It is indeed from the 
religions of paganism, and from them alone, that the proposi- 
tion in debate can be proved, and to examine it by present 
sentiments, or to make our enlarged views the standard of the 
past, would be erroneous in fact, and illogical in argument. It 
is futile to urge, on mere general grounds, the expediency of 
such sanctions, if their influential weight in this particular 
case cannot be proved ; and to show the existence of the sanc- 
tion would be equally vain, unless the existence of some unseen 
being or beings, who established that sanction, shall likewise 
be proved ; and even the fact of such beings would still be 
inconclusive to the point, unless they be of such acknowledged 
attributes as to lead to a necessary connection between punish- 
ment to come and what is detrimental to the state on one 
hand, and between reward to come, and that which is service- 
able to it, on the other. To all purposes of reward the pagan 
creed of a future state was utterly unfitted, and in the shadowy 
receptacle of departed spirits, the region of unsubstantial 
pleasures, the mere mimicry of life, Homer paints his phan- 
tom-heroes as unsatisfied with the homage of the inferior 
shades, sighing for the upper world they had left behind them, 
and mourning, in their visionary elysium, for the more real 
earth which they had lost for ever. The islands of the blessed, 
which the genius of Pindar has consecrated to us, were the 
reserved abodes of heroes, and of demi gods, the especial fa- 
vourites of Jupiter, and, safe in that ocean whose breezes were 
said to refresh their fairy shores, they denied their enjoyments 



40 

to the souls of ordinary mortals. Even the paradise of Virgil, 
with its purple light and broader firmament, has, in its frui- 
tion, the same airy and impalpable being, and concludes its 
brief period, its puny eternity, by the waters of oblivion, and 
the unconscious forgetfulness of re-existence ! Such was the 
reward which was held out to uphold the courage of virtue 
and muzzle the madness of impotent appetites, and when, on 
the other hand, we regard the terrors of the pagan hell, there 
is a child-like particularity, a variety of poetical imagination 
about it, which the strong-minded would reject with contempt, 
and even the weakest learn to fling aside among the rods and 
fool-caps of the nursery. Nor can it be objected, that this is 
rather the creed of poets, than the popular belief; for poets, 
in this case, were the only prophets ; tradition the only chan- 
nel of information ; and the Iliad and Odyssey their bible and 
text-book. These were the only sanctions which religion, as 
religion, had to give, or which the legislator dared absolutely 
to confirm. And when we turn from them to the divinities, 
whose attributes alone could ensure their execution ; when we 
gaze on the symbols of their abominations, the stocks and the 
stones wherein they were personified, lust translated to Olym- 
pus, revenge and blood-shed deified, the passions of reprobate 
man scowling and leering from the throne of God, and, far 
aloof from this motley and revolting assemblage, a gloomy des- 
tiny riding triumphant over all ; to think of this, and imagine 
for a moment that such a creed, so sanctioned, could contri- 
bute to the happiness, or was necessary to the existence of 
social order, charity must be carried to imbecility, faith to cre- 
dulity, and prejudice to absolute blindness. If such be the 
case in regard to a future state of reward and punishment, 
and such the little influence it could have had on the real in- 
terests of the community, it may be asked, where are we to 
look for any countervailing power which, in spite of that 
black catalogue of crimes given to us by the apostle, could keep 
the frame-work of heathen society together ? We must look 
for it in those moral instincts, which nothing can obliterate ; 
we must look for it in that beneficent arrangement of things, 



41 

which has made the expedient, in all cases, and the agreeable, 
in most, coincident with virtue and justice ; which has con- 
trived, by self-interest, and a thousand dependencies on the 
good opinion of our fellow creatures, to maintain the predo- 
minance of virtue under the most depressing circumstances, 
and to make connate with the human mind a principle of true 
religion strong enough to gleam through the clouds of super- 
stition, and to cherish some remnants of truth amidst all the 
impieties and absurdities of pagan idolatry. To these causes, 
therefore, and not to the exclusive influence of a belief in a 
future state of reward and punishment, which, not so Jar as 
it existed, but so far as it practically influenced, seems consi- 
derably over-rated, would we attribute the well-being of so- 
ciety among the nations of antiquity. Magistrates and philo- 
sophers, we know, positively rejected the doctrine, and, in its 
moral influence on individuals, it must have acted, if it acted 
at all, in spite of the popular creed, and in so far as it differed 
from, not so far as it coincided with, the national religion. 
That no national religion indeed could or did sustain itself 
without it is abundantly evident ; but it arose from this circum- 
stance, that such religion was founded in all cases on impres- 
sions antecedently existing in the members of the community ; 
and since a future state is indisputably a part of that common 
religious faith which has prevailed among every nation of the 
globe, a statesman could not, if he would, have proscribed 
the doctrine, nor would he, if he could, have denied a belief 
which holds out to reason so convincing a solution of the ine- 
qualities of providence, to the conscience a vengeance beyond 
the grave, and to the legislator's pretensions a sanction to 
obedience, the reality of which could never be disproved^ 
But it was, notwithstanding, too indefinite and loose, too little 
brought down to practice by an accompanying knowledge of 
the nature and relations of moral* duty, to be any other than 
an inactive principle. It was not in this doctrine, therefore,, 
that the legislator, in reality, rested the service of religion to 
the state ; it was rather by the inculcation of a peculiar and a 
national providence ; it was by the immediate interposition of 



42 

the god ; it was by making him the mouth-piece of the magis- 
trate j by interpreting the visitations of nature into the instru- 
ments of his vengeance ; by omens and auguries, and all the 
machinery of priestcraft, the operation of whose wheels he 
guided with his own hand ; it was by a thousand methods like 
these that he moved, as with a lever, the passions and feelings 
of an ignorant and superstitious multitude, while he occupied 
their minds, and dazzled their senses by the altar and the tem- 
ple, the pomps, and shows, and gorgeous ceremonial of a na- 
tional religion. This attempt in the pagan world to make the 
immediate interposition of heaven the great engine of go- 
vernment, has wholly escaped the observation of War- 
burton, and in his eagerness to give all possible relief 
to the omission of a future state by Moses, he has given 
an undue prominence to its power in other circumstances. 
In urging the necessity of religion to the well-being of a 
.state as exemplified by the conduct, and inculcated by the 
precepts of the sages and philosophers of antiquity, he has for- 
gotten that, whilst they dared not omit, and failed not to im- 
press the doctrine in question, they showed, at the same mo- 
ment, how little adequate they deemed it, without the applica- 
tion of other instruments, to effect the purpose which they had 
most at heart. The necessity of an oath, warranted by the dread 
of some superior power, able to register, and resolute to avenge, 
would seem to lead more directly, than any other civil act, to 
the acknowledgment of a future state of retribution. Yet even 
here the same disposition to look for the immediate interposi- 
tion of supernatural power, and in default of its manifestation, 
to discredit its existence altogether, is indisputably evident; 
and when men reasoned on these inequalities and inconsisten- 
cies, it rather led to the denial of any providence at all, than 
to the acknowledgment of another world. And this for an 
evident reason, since to conclude from the sufferings of virtue 
here, that it will be rewarded hereafter, we must already have 
distinctly settled in our own minds the Divine attributes of 
justice and mercy, together with their immediate relation to 
the affairs of men ; a combination of ideas to which no pagan 



43 

ever distinctly reached. The celebrated lines of Claudian on 
Rufinus, the remarks of the clown in the clouds of Aristo- 
phanes, and the reasonings of Lucretius on the same subject, 
mark out the channel, into which the thoughts of those who 
reasoned, almost inevitably ran. There are two tales told by 
Herodotus, one of a breach of trust by Glaucus, and another 
of those men who were surrendered to Xerxes to atone for the 
murder of his heralds, which are a further exemplification of 
this looking for an instant interposition, and in the entailment 
in both those cases of the death due to the parents on the chil- 
dren, as a just retribution, lead us immediately to some of the 
most striking characteristics of the Mosaic law. In short, in all 
ages, and in those more particularly, where the notions of reli- 
gion, either from its corruption or the want of natural light, 
are vague and indistinct, there is a disposition in the human 
mind to transfer to the moral the invariable laws of the phy- 
sical world, and to place in this present scene of things the 
reward of virtue, and the punishment of guilt. This subject 
is very wide, and might be pursued much further ; but it may 
be sufficient here to suggest, whether this coincidence between 
the auguries of the human mind, and the Mosaic enactment, 
the absolute arrogation to itself, on the part of the Jewish law, 
of that ever present power to reward and to avenge, which was 
only timidly insinuated by the politicians and legislators of the 
heathen world, might not be successfully pressed much further 
than has ever hitherto been attempted ; and more than supply 
the deficiency we have noticed in Warburton's argument, in 
his attempt to show, that society could not and did not exist, 
save through the all-powerful influence of the doctrine of future 
rewards and punishments. However this may be, it certainly 
has ever co-existed with religious instinct, and with religion 
in general been turned (with political purposes as the sole end) 
to the civil uses of the community. In Warburton's statement 
of this part of his subject, the speculations of the modern Peri- 
patetic, Pomponatius, the ravings of Cardan, the impieties of 
Collins, and the fine-wrought sophistries and dangerous Pyrr- 
honism of Bayle, are examined and exposed, and the connexion 



44 

between society and religion,, religion and a providence, pro- 
vidence and another state of perfect retribution, established at 
great length. We have next to examine therefore the actual 
practice of lawgivers, and from Charondas and Zaleucus, names 
dim in the mists of antiquity, down to Draco and Solon, names 
familiar as our own, from the statesman whose institutions dyed 
with their essential colouring the genius of republics, down to 
the political romancer who framed laws for the Utopias of 
his own brain, all with one voice proclaim the reality of a Pro- 
vidence, introduce their respective codes under the sanction of 
the Divinity, and raise the palladium of social existence, not in 
the chamber of the senate or the tribunal of the judge, but in 
the temple of the Gods. But Warburton has gone further, and, 
by an examination of the pagan mysteries, and particularly the 
most majestic of them all, those of the Eleusinean Ceres, has 
shown that they too bear certain and infallible marks of having 
been originally instituted for the same great purposes of state. 
Under the immediate guardianship of the magistrate, venerable 
in their antiquity, and hallowed as the most majestic rite and 
sacrament of religion, the lesser mysteries unfolded the gates 
of the temple to all the citizens of the state ; they awakened 
all the awe of which the mind is susceptible, by tremendous 
oaths and a terrific initiation, and, amidst alternate delight and 
horror, the lightenings and thunder, the sights and sounds of 
infernal torture on one hand, and the brightness of a mimic 
Elysium on the other, the Hierophant revealed to the trembling 
Neophyte the truths of a future state, and urged, by the hope 
of especial rewards, the practice of virtue, and the purification 
of the soul. In the greater mysteries, which were reserved ex- 
clusively for the higher orders in the state, the origin of society, 
the progress of religious worship from stellar idolatry, its fairest, 
to that of brutes, its lowest form, the truth that the popular 
Gods were but deifications of dead men, and the awful secret 
that the true God of the universe was the Eternal One, formed 
the still more instructive and jastounding revelation. The first 
consisted of shows to impress the imagination of the multitude, 
who were to be governed, the last were doctrines to illuminate 



45 

the understanding of the few who were to govern, and to fit 
them for the exercise of those popular illusions which were the 
indispensible instruments of state policy. The bold conjectures 
and adventurous steps which Warburton was obliged to take 
for the explanation and developement of these extraordinary 
institutions, have led him in one instance however to an extra- 
vagant licentiousness of critical exposition. We feel the 
general certainty of his conclusions, and bow to the crowd of 
authorities which he has summoned together on the question, 
in the Delphic hymn we listen delightedly to the song of the 
initiated, in the descent of iEneas we doubt not but that we 
behold the very pageantry of the mysterious cell, but when 
the iEneid is metamorphosed into an essay on Government, 
when our favourite heroes shrink from flesh and blood into 
personifications of state maxims, when our passions are called 
into action to feel for self-evident axioms, and our sympathies 
assailed for political verities in masquerade, we begin with 
vague curiosity, listen with stubborn incredulity, and at length 
turn away from the unblushing allegorist in uncontroulable dis- 
gust. From the legislators Warburton proceeds to the philoso- 
phers of antiquity, whose declarations as to the political advan- 
tages of religion and the doctrine of a future state, is no less fully, 
and universally expressed. The evidence which is borne by 
them to the importance of the doctrine is the more unequivocal, 
because, from the contrast between their public declarations and 
their private opinions, their esoteric and exoteric doctrine, their 
declarations on the point could proceed from nothing, but a 
full persuasion on one hand of the necessity of religion to the 
commonwealth, and on the other, that a future state was the 
very vital part of that religion, and lastly that to separate them 
would go to destroy that influence which divine worship exer- 
cises over the minds of the multitude. Now that the doctrine 
of a future state of rewards and punishments is one, which it is 
impossible that the great masters of pagan philosophy should in 
reality have held, is evident from this — that they had without ex- 
ception adopted certain metaphysical notions concerning the Di- 
vine nature, and the mode of the soul's future existence which at 



46 

once shut the gate on their reception of that all important 
truth. For though the Italic and Ionic schools from the time 
of Socrates recognised the existence of the one and Eternal 
God, yet they stripped him of all moral attributes, left him to 
dwell alone, far from the cares of Government, in cloudless 
and unruffled solitude, snatched from his hand the scourge 
and the lightnings, and held it a contradiction to suppose that 
the Divinity could, in his calmness, kindle into resentment, 
and an impiety, that he could, in his goodness, arm his right 
hand to punish. Even the goodness of the Supreme Being 
was divested of all free will ; the same destiny which forbad 
him the trembling worship which an angry Omnipotence could 
exact, refused him the grateful homage which voluntary benefits 
might inspire, clothed him with kindness by the same necessity 
that clothed the sun with light, and whilst it made him the first 
and highest of beings, robbed him of the free-will which is the 
privilege of the lowest. The early history of the Church paints 
in strong colours the effect of this prejudice against the recep- 
tion of Christianity, whilst in the efforts of the christian advo- 
cates Arnobius and Lactantius to establish the opposite truth, 
we see the Divinity agitated by the passions of flesh and blood, 
and, in the strange blindness of both parties to the distinction 
between infinite justice as a perfection of God, and selfish resent- 
ment, the failing of a creature, we know not which most se- 
verely to condemn, the folly which reduced the Supreme Being 
into a machine of insensate amiability, or the impiety that 
would attribute to him the passionate transports of a man. — 
Again, whilst they held that the soul was immortal, they gave 
it a past eternity as the only security for that which was to 
come, assigned to it the incommunicable attributes of the great 
first cause, deemed it a segment severed for a time from the 
all-containing essence, and made it float awhile in a separated 
form, till, the vessel being broken, the spirit mingled, like a 
bursting bubble, with the surrounding mass, and lost sense, 
will, and consciousness in the immensity of its parent ocean.— 
That with opinions like these, with eyes blind-folded by her 
own wilfulness, philosophy should attain to the conviction of a 



47 

future state of rewards and punishments was indeed impossi- 
ble, and it is to be regretted that christian divines, misled by a 
certain vague and indistinct greatness which seems to accom- 
pany the notion, should ever have admired in the blasphemous 
doctrine of the anima mundi the wonderful efforts of a reason 
able to cope, in its discoveries, with revelation itself. There is 
moreover too great a disposition to defer to the authority of 
pagan philosophy, an infirm wish to prove the reasonableness of 
Christianity, by showing that the unassisted intellect has reach- 
ed most of its verities, which, we must think with Warburton, 
has done infinite harm and injustice to revelation, by attempt- 
ing to prove its reasonableness at the expense of its necessity. 
Sykes indeed has advocated against him the cause of philoso- 
phy, but with the ill success which should wait on all attempts 
to piece out the structure of Christianity from the ruins and 
rubbish of antiquity, and pollute its pure and costly materials, 
its marble and porphyry, with the tiles and potsherds of human 
invention. Truth, and religious truth in particular, is obvious 
when discovered, and so much in harmony with reason is it as to 
appear completely within its reach, but to penetrate into its 
recesses, that very reason, perverted rather than guided by the 
vanities of pagan metaphysics, must be judged to have been 
wholly incapable. Thus universal then is shown to be the con- 
sent of mankind on this point, thus unvarying and undeviating 
the theories of philosophy and the practice of legislation in 
asserting the prime importance of a belief in a future state to 
ensure the welfare, or, at least, to maintain the subordination of 
society. This unanimous consent on the part of the legislators 
of antiquity is with sure and certain steps traced to Egypt, the 
common fountain of their knowledge, and from that great 
mother of monsters and superstition flowed those principles of 
social arrangement, which animate without exception the sys- 
tems of the sages, who became in after times the nurslings of 
her wisdom. From all the information which we can collect, 
it does not appear that the physical science, which the colleges 
of Egypt could communicate, was by any means extensive ; 
but on the contrary that it existed, as far as it went, rather 



48 

in distinct maxims, oral traditions, and unconnected dogmas 
than in regular systems, or the order of inductive reason- 
ings; it has therefore become a question in what lay the 
wisdom of Egypt which antiquity has celebrated and in 
which the law-giver of the Jews was so deeply initiated, 
and "when stripped of all the mysteriousness which history and 
poetry, reason and fancy have conspired to throw around it, 
we must conclude with Warburton, that it was the art of legis- 
lation and the science of government in which the spirit of its 
boasted knowledge was concentrated. It must not be sup- 
posed, however, as the manner of Warburton would imply, that 
the information which could be there collected, concerning a fu- 
ture state of reward and punishment, was at all more accurate 
in its nature and extent than that, which the traditions and feel- 
ings of the rest of the world, whether barbarous or civilized, 
could supply. Its adaptation only to political purposes could 
be studied there to greater advantage than in any other school 
or legislation, while its moral use and boundless application to 
the service of virtue was smothered beneath a ten-fold burthen 
of error and superstition. Above all let it not be incautiously 
imagined, that the kingly hierarchy of Egypt studied the poli- 
tical science with a view to the public good ; we cannot look 
on that gigantic fabric of superstition, the labyrinthine confu- 
sion of its creed, its chaos of stellar idolatry, deified mortals, 
and monster-gods, the sons and daughters of a sickly imagina- 
tion, we cannot think of the worse than darkness with which 
these multiplied impostures quenched the spark of natural 
truth, without being convinced that it was the industriously 
woven web of a designing priestcraft, the devices of an ac- 
complished tyranny, which strove to perpetuate its power by 
the moral and intellectual degradation of the people. Had the 
legislators of antiquity possessed more extended views of gene- 
ral advantage, the doctrine of a future state, inseparable as 
they found it from the mass of mankind who had not time or 
inclination to reason it away, offered it in connection with moral 
duty a wide scope for his benevolent efforts, a boundless field 
for a disinterested philanthropy. But, whatever may have 



49 

been the case with the legislators of remote ages, the rulers at 
once and civilizers of the world, the system pursued by the 
higher orders of after times, was essentially selfish. Infidels 
themselves, theists or atheists, believers in no God at all, or 
in one who had no moral attributes, they all inculcated alike 
the doctrine of a Providence, whose oracles they held in their 
own hands, only as a machine of government, and rested it 
alternately, as it served their purpose, on the sanction of im- 
mediate rewards and punishments, or on those whose fulfilment 
was reserved for a world to come. It was moreover a religion 
not of individuals but of the state, and as long as a Providence 
could so far be introduced as to aid in the administration of the 
latter, the former were abandoned to the creed of their own 
inclinations, a compromise, as history proves it to have been, 
between the widest possible indulgence of every natural pas- 
sion, and that necessity of our being which makes religious 
belief, in some form or other, inseparable from our constitu- 
tion. Such are the reflections suggested by Warburton's first 
proposition, including in that division the necessity of a future 
state of rewards and punishments to the existence of society, 
and the testimony borne to that necessity by the practice of 
statesmen, and the theories of philosophers. Warburton con- 
cludes this part of his subject by a series of masterly observa- 
tions in which he shows that the utility of the doctrine in ques- 
tion is an evidence of its truth, that to show it to have been 
originally introduced by the Legislator would be no evidence 
against it, and that human nature and history conspire to prove 
it more than probable that the pretence to inspiration, and con- 
sequently the doctrines that follow the belief in an interposing 
God, were really credited by those who laid claim to superna- 
tural direction. Nothing can be more striking than Warbur- 
ton's observations on the enthusiasm which forms so essential 
a feature in those remarkable men, who, from time to time, 
"have brought about political and religious revolutions, and al- 
ternately renewed and desolated the face of the moral world. 
The union of imposture and self-delusion, the fire of im- 
pulse and the coldness of calculation, their mutual action and 

E 



50 

re-action., the order in which they succeed each other, and the 
different phases which in their various combinations they exhi- 
bit to the world, are delineated with a profound knowledge of 
human nature, and an insight into the very soul of historical 
truth which are unparalleled by any passage of similar length 
except perhaps the character of Cromwell, as drawn by a 
kindred genius, the celebrated Bossuet. And, though the 
innovator in theology would probably have been a partizan in 
history, one almost wishes, in perusing the portraitures of 
Vane, Fleetwood, and Lambert, that the discoverer of facts in 
the one, could be exchanged for a mere interpreter of the 
spirit of the other. 



51 



CHAPTER V. 

Summary of the Argument — its application to the sceptical op- 
posers of the Divine Legation. 

IT has been shown therefore that, first, the belief in a fu- 
ture state of reward and punishment was universal; — secondly, 
that the original founders of the ancient commonwealths ex- 
pressly inculcated it; — thirdly, that the philosophers and poli- 
ticians of succeeding times, endeavoured by all means in their 
power to maintain it ; — fourthly, that as they did not believe 
it themselves, they must have inculcated the doctrine, only be- 
cause they were convinced of its importance. Thus much has 
Warburton incontestibly proved, but his conclusion must be 
modified by three considerations — that the governing orders of 
the state deemed it, not so much necessary to the existence of 
society generally, as to their own predominance in particular — 
again, that the public religion of each community consisting of 
forms, and not of doctrines, it had, so far as it was a national 
belief, no connection whatever with individual morality — and 
lastly, that the tendency to listen to any pretences that implied 
the present interposition of a Providence, the instincts of mo- 
rality, and other causes, are enough to explain the existence of 
society, in that distracted and degraded state of it which was 
all that antiquity knew, without the influence of a doctrine 
which was a vague impression, hot a conviction, a principle of 
the imagination, not a law of the conscience. And this last 
supposition, let it be said, is the only representation of the case 
which squares exactly with the demonstrable conclusion which 
the Author of the Divine Legation so unhesitatingly claims. — 
But there are other circumstances which more than counter- 
balance these objections, objections which, after all, modify 
rather than change the argument of Warburton. It is a belief 
to which the records of all ages and of all countries testify, 



52 

and, however dormant in action, has maintained its hold on 
the human heart with a tenacity which no effort has been able 
to unloose; it may have been powerless to prevent crime, but 
we know that it was strong enough to raise indistinct horrors 
in the guilty conscience; it may have been asleep in life, but it 
awoke with all its stings in death. If in systems the end of 
which was purely and avowedly political, it still held a place 
as a sanction, in any system where the policy was subordinate 
to religion, it might be expected to breathe its spirit through 
every enactment. If in circumstances where the moral attri- 
butes of the Divinity were not understood, it still had a dis^ 
tinct existence, incapable of proof, yet indestructible, surely 
in a Code where those attributes, in every act of prescribed 
duty, asserted their reality, the attendant sanction could not 
be wanting. Where no indulgence was given to the licenti- 
ousness of the will, undoubtedly the only reward, which seems 
available as a motive, must, we should expect, be inscribed in 
characters of light. If the existence of such a system could be 
distinctly proved, and if the character of its acknowledged 
founder were invested with the qualities of mind and genius 
which the office of a legislator imperiously demands, with the 
same sanctions for his religion and commonwealth open to his 
knowledge and his use which the rest of mankind enjoyed, 
with greater opportunities for their ascertainment, with greater 
necessity for their application, and yet with a total omission of 
them all, that it would prove that the Legislator himself de- 
pended on some supernatural aid, every one must confess, 
and that the presence of such supernatural aid would be well- 
nigh demonstrated, few would be hardy enough to deny. That 
such was the case with the Mosaic law, and that the omission 
of the doctrine proves the Divinity of that, which, unless under 
the supposition of that Divinity, could not have existed at all, 
is the argument of Warburton. This omission having been al- 
ready granted by the infidel impugners of the Legation — the 
whole strength of the foregoing argument falls on them, with- 
out anything to break its weight. The principal defences un- 
der which they shelter themselves are two, one peculiar to 



53 

themselves and drawn out at length by Lord Bolingbroke, which 
asserts that Moses himself might have been ignorant of the doc- 
trine, and another shared by them with the orthodox assailants 
of Warburton, and resting on the a 'priori argument that a re- 
velation without a future state is utterly unworthy of the Su- 
preme Power ! — When however it is allowed on all hands that 
the mind of Moses was imbued and steeped in the very essence 
of the Egyptian mysteries, and that he was versed in all the 
knowledge of that extraordinary people, the stamp of whose 
ceremonies is still left on many of his own institutions, it is in- 
deed an extravagant assumption to imagine that he was igno- 
rant of a doctrine which we know was not only privately held, 
but even popularly taught. But this assertion is followed by 
one still more extraordinary, which would make Moses scepti- 
cal of the doctrine, even if he knew of its existence, and de- 
terred by a conscientious regard to truth from inculcating it 
on the Israelitish People. But the doctrine was universally 
held in Egypt, and he must therefore have known it ; it was 
applied as an instrument of government, and he must there- 
fore have been acquainted with its use ; his writings display an 
acquaintance with the moral attributes of God which remove 
all cause for doubt, and he must therefore have believed it. 
And even in the absence of all antecedent certainty that it 
must have been familiar to his mind ; it may with too decisive 
a logic be immediately deduced from the Pentateuch to allow 
any escape to such an egregious fallacy. And in this division 
of our subject, whilst we are instituting a comparison between 
the sanctions of the Mosaic law and those of the Pagan legis- 
lators, we ought not to pass unnoticed the consummate skill 
with which Warburton has conducted this part of his state- 
ment, nor in the astonishing power, with which, through the 
medium of the Egyptian wisdom, he has brought them into 
juxta-position and immediate contrast, refuse to recognize a 
master-piece of argumentation. But the other argument still 
remains, and Dr. Stebbing has rested too much upon it, and 
staked too confidently the issue of the contest in its truth to 
allow it to pass unnoticed. The essence of religion is defined 



54 

by the Apostle to be " a belief that God is, and that he is a 
rewarder of all them that diligently seek Him." But God 
may surely, if he pleases, propose rewards in such a manner 
as to shower them immediately on those who obey his pre- 
scribed commands ; and that such an obedience would be to 
all intents and purposes a religious obedience, and such a be- 
lief in the Almighty, affecting the mind with the prospect of 
immediate rew r ard and punishment, a proper religion, and wor- 
thy of its Author, is little else than self-evident. Besides, re- 
wards and punishments, for obedience and disobedience, dur- 
ing the period of this limited existence, as they would not in 
the least degree exclude the belief in another state of being, so 
would not interfere with the correspondent sanctions of that 
future state. Natural religion teaches from the attributes of 
the Almighty that there must be a retribution hereafter, be- 
cause good and evil are unequally distributed here, and that 
there must be a life to come because Providence is partial in 
the present one ; but, under the hypothesis of an equal admi- 
nistration already carried on, no one will be bold enough to 
deny that this demonstrable necessity is at an end. But this 
mode of reasoning, in addition to its unjustifiable arrogance, is 
in reality a petitio principii of the question at issue. Through 
all the reasonings of this nature against the Divine Legation 
there is either a strange blindness, or a perverse misrepresenta- 
tion of Warburton's hypothesis which reflects equal discredit 
on the head, and on the heart of his opponents. It is indeed 
true, as the sceptic urges, that no revelation could be genuine, 
which held out no hopes of compensation for inequalities here, 
unless God should be pleased to make an equal Providence his 
sanction ; it is true, as Dr. Stebbing asserts, that a revelation, 
leaving, as far as this omission is concerned, the attributes of 
its author in jeopardy, would be unworthy of the Almighty, 
unless an equal providence vindicates them. But, such a mode 
of supplying the defect is, from beginning to end, asserted by 
Warburton, and to disprove the assertion, not to take its false- 
hood for granted, is evidently the only legitimate mode of rea- 
soning on the subject. Another egregious error into which 



55 

Stebbing has fallen in his zeal against Warburton, has been 
to deny that Warburton's argument, even if proved, can be 
considered as a proper internal evidence, and then, with a 
strange contradiction of terms and ideas he asserts that the true 
internal evidence of the Legislation is to be derived from " the 
presumption that Moses had the assurance and the experience 
of an extraordinary Providence." This, in addition to other 
errors, destroys the essential difference between external and 
internal evidence, the latter of which means that you take 
some notorious fact in the constitution of a religion, not in 
dispute itself, to demonstrate the truth of some other fact sup- 
ported by evidence, which is contested. Thus from the noto- 
rious fact of the omission of a future state in the Mosaic law, 
Warburton deduces its Divine Commission, the thing denied. 



56 



CHAPTER VI. 

Whether the doctrine of a future state was a sanction of the 
Mosaic Law. 

THIS brings us to the ascertainment of a truth in which 
divines and not sceptics are the opponents of Warburton's 
theory. Now it is plain, that nothing can be called the sanc- 
tion of a given law or institution, which the framer of that law 
does not himself lay down, either as a reward for its observ- 
ance, or a punishment for its neglect. There may possibly 
indeed be other circumstances which may even powerfully con- 
tribute as motives to free agents for obedience to the command 
in question, but still they cannot in any truth or correctness of 
speech be entitled sanctions. A human law for instance threat- 
ens an offender with a personal chastisement, the execution of 
which, if the crime be committed, will prove the power, as the 
threat did the intention of the enacter; and the enactment alto- 
gether shows that both parties deemed such sanction necessary, 
even if the nature of the case itself did not demonstrate it to 
be so. It may be that some other prospect of distant loss may 
combine in deterring from the act in question ; it may be that 
the distant prospect (though this from our constitution is in 
fact impossible) may be the sole motive, and the present expec- 
tation act not at all, but no one would in this case assert that 
the proper sanction of the ordinance was this distant prospect, 
to which the law has not, in the remotest degree, alluded, and 
to which it has not appealed to show the reality of its power. 
So that, should the belief in a future state of retribution have 
been in force among the Jews, a question at present in abeyance, 
and yet not held out in the remotest degree as a motive whereby 
to enforce the Mosaic ordinances, such a belief is not a sanction 
of the law. And on the other hand, should it be admitted that 
there are some laws the establishment of which could not have 
been carried into effect but by one of two methods, the absence 
of one of those methods being proved, and, at the same time, 



57 

the existence of the law in despite of that absence being granted, 
the employment of the other, the sanction in debate, is de- 
monstratively shown. An examination of the Mosaic code will 
at once show that the omission of a future state as a sanction, 
is really such as Warburton states it to be, and as the Deist, to 
his own refutation, allows ; and will at the same time time tell 
us the reason why its admission was not demanded, to the sa- 
tisfaction of the believer. The end of the Mosaic law was to 
preserve the knowledge of the one true God, and to prepare 
the way and open as it were an entrance into the world, with 
his proper credentials, to the advent of the Messiah ; the im- 
mediate tendency of that law was to preserve the Jews, by 
ordinances admirably fitted for that purpose, from the infection 
of idolatry. An ordinary providence, and the instincts of a 
future state would have been here, as in the rest of the world, 
totally unavailing, and to antedate the sanctions of eternal life 
had been inconsistent with God's administration, his impartiality 
to the rest of mankind his common children, and the necessary 
absence, as yet, of the only means and conditions on which his 
justice and mercy could grant it. Temporal rewards and pu- 
nishments therefore for a law which had a temporary end 
only, and one exclusive community as its object, were essen- 
tially necessary. That such were the sanctions, and the only 
sanctions, on which the Jewish lawgiver rested his code, War- 
burton was not the first, in clear and absolute terms, to assert. 
Genius, learning, and piety, in the names of Grotius, Episcopius, 
and Bishop Bull, had long since expressed the same opinion on 
the subject. The same God whose out-stretched arm had 
smitten the River-Dragon of Egypt, and rescued the sojourn- 
ers from his gripe, who made the sea dry land before the 
fugitives and an overwhelming ocean to their pursuers, who 
spoke in thunder from the smoking rocks of Sinai, and led 
them with the pillar of cloud through the wilderness, every 
spot of which was radiant with the manifestations of the Divine 
Presence, announces in every line his determination to vindi- 
cate, by immediate interposition, his curses and his blessings 
on the elected conquerers of Canaan ! Victory and prosperity, 
all the delights that could be found in a land flowing with milk 



58 

and honey, all the blessings that could grow from beneath the 
footsteps of a beneficent God, who, in the tabernacle of the 
desert, and the temple of triumphant Zion, vouchsafed to dwell 
among men, were the chartered privileges of obedience; sorrow, 
and bondage and scorn from below, plague and pestilence and 
anger poured out, from above, shook their accumulated terrors 
over the head of rebellion. Even those curses, which were to 
extend beyond their existence as a nation, which were to cleave 
to them after the establishment of the second covenant, and 
even beyond the hour when the Roman Eagle had hunted out 
its prey, convey no intimation of the sanctions of a future world 
then announced and in force, but the threat of temporal degra- 
dation, of an accursed and supernatural existence without king 
or priest or temple, a wonder, a hissing, and an abomination, 
the symbols of a branded and a reprobate race ! So complete 
throughout is the sanction of temporal rewards and punishments 
peculiar to the law, and so even yet do they vindicate their reality ! 
And even Moses, who had doubtless looked on many a vision 
of heavenly glory, and had foreseen the spiritual blessings of 
the Messiah's kingdom, did not close his eyes on the world, 
before, on the very eve of his translation, he had beheld from 
the top of Pisgah the promised land, the scene of the earthly 
promises which he had prophecied, the typical Paradise of God ! 
There is something moreover striking and very remarkable in 
the tone of unshrinking confidence with which the great Pro- 
phet appeals to his hearers, as to persons whose senses had 
been long familiarized to the tokens of an interposing deity, 
something awful in the unequivocal and unhesitating voice in 
which he pours forth his denunciations, the voice of one who 
doubted not but that the elements waited upon his word, and 
that he held in his own hand, the keys wherewith to open all 
the store-houses of wrath ! Nor must it be omitted, that the 
moment, when he was breathing this conscious spirit of inspi- 
ration, was one in which nothing but madness or a genuine 
commission from God would have promised temporal blessings, 
or pronounced temporal maledictions. The people, to whom 
their Prophet and Lawgiver was bidding farewell, were, like 
the Scandinavians of Odin, and the Arabs of Mahomet, about 



59 

to enter on an exterminating war. Yet, in the very jaws of 
danger, when death and bloodshed, in spite of all human pre- 
caution, are licensed to do their work, he pronounces that one 
of the chosen race shall put a thousand to flight, whilst Odin or 
Mahomet shrink their timid inspiration into the dim announce- 
ment of rewards to come, and cheer the expiring warrior by 
the stern and savage revellings of Valhalla, or the more melting 
raptures of a voluptuous paradise. But these two last cir- 
cumstances, though each of them a strong internal evidence of 
the Divine Legation against the sceptic, are lines of argument 
wholly distinct from that which is taken by Warburton, and the 
claims to temporal sanctions and an extraordinary Providence 
is all that he here demands, as, at once, excluding the other, 
and carrying with it the adequate substitution. Nor is the 
sanction of a future state omitted altogether as a sanction of 
the law only, but in the historical narrative which counts the 
chosen race with the antidiluvian and the primeval promises 
of the Messiah, there is a studied silence, and a premeditated 
reserve on this subject which is scarcely less evident than its 
absence from the law itself. It will be enough to touch, at 
once as proofs and examples, on the history of the fall, and the 
translation of Enoch, the brevity, mysteriousness, and re- 
markable obscurity of which have been commented upon at 
length by Le Clere. Not that it is to be thought, that the 
doctrine may not most clearly and satisfactorily be deduced from 
the Pentateuch, nor that it was not designed to be thence col- 
lected ; nor, that it is otherwise than impossible for a pious and 
spiritual mind not to discover it ; nor even, that it would not 
have been a sin in the sight of heaven not to have reached this 
great truth. But only that it is as darkly intimated as is, in any 
degree, consistent with those conditions and intentions, and that 
there is a very zealous care distinctly visible throughout, lest 
the doctrine should be perverted into a part, or a sanction, or 
in any way or degree an effect of the legal ordinances ! How 
reasonable this was, how consistent with the divine goodness, 
and how necessary from the nature of the case itself it follows, 
by a few remarks^ sufficiently to prove. 



60 



CHAPTER VII. 

Future Reward and Punishment could not have been made a 
sanction of the Mosaic Law. 

IT was in truth impossible that eternal life should have been 
an appropriate sanction of the law, and it is confessed by Dr. 
Stebbing in the midst of his reasonings against the Divine Le- 
gation that to teach it was not a part of the commission given 
by God to Moses. That it was not a part, or to be found in 
the Mosaic Law, that is, not to be discovered or distinctly 
taught, or clearly announced in it, is the substance of War- 
burton's second great proposition. Nor is the weight of his 
conclusion in any way affected by the cause of the omission, 
and to assert, as is a very favourite mode of slurring over the 
argument, " That he did not teach it because it was not a gift of 
the law," does not in the least render the reasoning, that would 
draw the necessity of divine interference from the omission, 
whatever may have been the reason that dictated it, less logical 
or less certain. Satisfied therefore with proving the omission, 
Warburton has not entered at so great length as he might have 
done on the reasons which, to a believer's mind, are absolutely 
conclusive against the possibility of making the doctrine in ques- 
tion a sanction of the law. It is however extremely important 
as illustrative of the genius of the former and latter dispensa- 
tions, and an irrefragable confirmation to the opinion of War- 
burton upon the subject. The gift of immortality, from the 
beginning to the end of scripture, is represented in indissoluble 
connection with the Redeemer, whose privilege it was, through 
the meritorious sacrifice of himself, to appease the wrath of an 
offended God, and to unbar those gates of Eden, whose en- 
trance the flaming sword of the cherubim had forbidden to 
fallen man. In his blood our hopes are planted, in his name 
our faith is called, on his merits our weakness reposes, and to 
his cross our eyes are uplifted as the emblazoned and accredited 



61 

sign of our salvation. ' < If there could have been a law which 
could have given eternal life," then we are assured that by the 
law justification would have been effected ; for without that 
justification the everlasting reward which is its result could 
never have been effected. But for two distinct reasons, each 
conclusive in itself, the Mosaic law was here imbecile and 
powerless. For, in the first place, it imposed obligations, and 
imperatively exacted duties, to the performance of which the 
fallen nature of man was utterly inadequate; and being inade- 
quate, it became subject to its awful penalty, and, in its help- 
lessness to avert that fearful sanction, recognized what the 
apostle emphatically styles, the ministration of death. — 
Again, it was impossible that the blood of bulls and of goats, 
which formed the body of Levitical ordinances, should take 
away sin. Those types and shadows of a mightier offering, 
had no efficacy in themselves, were in themselves worthless be- 
fore the eye of heaven, and left the soul of the worshipper as 
much stained with the taint of sin as it was before his body was 
sprinkled with the blood of the victim. Not only did the law 
want the efficacious title to eternal life through justification, 
which lay in the blood of Christ, but it was even destitute of 
the benefit of such expiation ; for St. Paul argues not, that the 
law granted remission of sins only through the future Messiah; 
who was the real author of the antecedent grace, but he denies 
that the law granted remission at all. Had immortality been a 
sanction of his law, that it would have been impossible for 
Moses as an inspired servant of the divine counsels, to have 
withheld the efficacious cause on which it could have rested, is 
a fact which carries its own proof. But as so to have declared 
it would have been utterly repugnant to the course prescribed 
by the Eternal Wisdom, to have withdrawn the veil from the 
dependent and co-existent truth was utterly impossible. That 
the merits of our saviour's sacrifice extend their influence as 
much backward to the beginning of the world, as they do for- 
ward to the end of it, is indeed certain, — that the faith which 
animated the patriarchs of old was faith in the promises of 
God generally, and in that of the Messiah, specifically, as far 



62 

as it went, is no less certain. But the fact only was at first re- 
vealed, the race from which he was to spring, the mode in 
which the destined triumph was to be wrought, and all the cir- 
cumstances of the passion, its mysterious instrument, were very 
gradually unfolded. The first announcement did indeed con- 
tain in embryo the whole of the divine counsel, but it demanded 
long ages to quicken the seed, to rear the stem, and to unfold 
all the leaves, the flowers, and the fruit of the ripened dis- 
pensation. The slightest consideration tells us that its imme- 
diate announcement would have annihilated the beautiful and 
gradual developement of the plan, and deprived the believer, 
in ages to come, of all that company of witnesses, all that 
pomp of inspiration, and all those clouds of prophecy, which 
growing brighter and brighter at the approach of him whom 
they foreran, drew their concentrated circle around the advent 
of the Messiah. The world in general too was as yet unfitted 
for the reception of the Deliverer, it was yet in its infancy, and 
those nations were yet unborn whose power and language were 
to form the ready instruments for the propagation of the truth. 
The promise was to mankind in general, the advantage was to 
the whole human race; the guardianship of the oracles of 
God was the lot of the Jews, not for their own sake, or for 
their own benefit, but as stewards for all their brethren, for 
the salvation of all the sons of Adam. As moreover the pro- 
mise of eternal life and the giving of the law would have been 
contemporary, no care and no distinction whatever could have 
so far separated them from an inevitable association as to pre- 
vent results the most ruinous to the reception of the Christian 
covenant. We know that the prejudices of the Jews in favour 
of the Mosaic law, that the exalted ideas which they entertain- 
ed of its sanctity, its efficacy, and its perfection, effectually 
alienated the mass of the nation from belief in our Saviour's 
mission, and blinded their eyes, and hardened their hearts 
against the testimonies of miracle, doctrine, and prophecy 
which stamped its divine reality. Now, though eternal life, 
as we have seen, forms no sanction of the law, it was undoubt- 
edly the popular belief of the Jews at the coming of our Sa- 



63 

viour, and the superstitious attachment of the Jewish converts 
to the observance of the whole of the Mosaic law, resulted 
from their belief that the doctrine of a future state formed an 
integral part of the Mosaic dispensation. The same likewise 
is the creed of the modern Jews, originating from the supposed 
perfection and eternity of their law, its all-sufficiency for sal- 
vation, its atoning efficacy, and its earnest of everlasting life. 
If such be the case, even when the doctrine in question does 
not form a declared sanction of the law, in the inevitable result 
which would have ensued had it been a sanction, we see in it- 
self a conclusive proof that it would not have been so intro- 
duced even had other obstacles been removed. If, where its 
intimations are confessedly so obscure, it yet had the effect of 
deterring the mass of the Jewish nation from the acceptance of 
Christianity, and tainted the faith of that part of it who were 
converted, it is obvious to mark the consequences of an open 
annunciation and an unconcealed inculcation of that great and 
illustrious truth. The evil would not have been confined to 
the Jewish nation, and as the Hebrew scriptures were des- 
tined to form a part of that rule of faith which was to descend 
to the latest generations of mankind, it would have bequeathed 
to them all the same fatal inheritance of error. The divine 
unity, and distinctness of the two dispensations, would have 
been lost, the substance and the shadow, the type and the 
reality, would have been inextrically confounded, the spiritual 
meaning would have struggled in vain to shake off its material 
clothing, and justification by faith, the prime star on the fore- 
head of Christianity, would have been supplanted by a crown, 
formed from the false and adulterate gems of human deserv- 
ings. The inspired writers of the New Testament have drawn 
the line of demarcation between the temporal promises of 
Moses, and the everlasting promises of Christ, in colours too 
strong to admit any doubt upon the subject, even if our own 
unassisted reason had not been sufficient to demonstrate the 
necessity of this distinction. That life and immortality were 
brought to light through the Gospel, that it has abolished 
death, that the law came by Moses, grace and truth by Christ, 



64 

that the law was only the shadow of good things to come, that 
we have a better covenant and better promises, in the decisive, 
uniform, and unequivocal language of the holy canon. This 
however, inconclusive to a Jew, is at least decisive with those 
who believe them to be parts of the same great whole, and 
that one part of scripture therefore cannot be in variance with, 
or in contradiction to another. The texts in the New Testa- 
ment which bear on the temporal promises and sanctions of the 
law have been criticised and commented on at great length by 
Warburton with his usual ability and acuteness of exposition. 
On the a priori part of the question he has comparatively but 
slightly touched. But the hints which he has given have been 
expanded and drawn out at greater length by Mr. Lancaster 
in his harmony of the law and the Gospel and with a clearness 
and force of reasoning not unworthy of his great predecessor, 
and perhaps his statement has lost nothing by the absence of 
that ardour which the vindication of a favourite theory neces- 
sarily excites, and which, while it might have given greater 
fire to his remarks, and vivacity to his style, might have marred 
the calm and dispassionate tone which at present distinguishes 
his argument. There are some remarks on the same subject 
in Mr. Davison's work on the origin of sacrifice, conceived in 
the usual strength of thought, and logical precision of that 
writer which offer important illustration to the point which we 
have just discussed. On the whole then, not only is the doc- 
trine of a future state not made a sanction of the Mosaic law, 
but it would have been inconsistent with its claim to inspiration 
to have made it otherwise. It would have marred the har- 
mony, order, and arrangement of God's counsels, and the only 
condition on which it could have been authoritatively announc- 
ed, would have been utterly inconsistent with the attainment 
of other ends, and the establishment of other purposes of in- 
finitely greater importance than the announcement of the doc- 
trine. Nor did the withholding of this truth entail any hard- 
ship on the Jewish nation, nor does it imply anything at vari- 
ance with those peculiar advantages which they may be sup- 
posed to have enjoyed as the especial people of God. It was 



65 

in being the depositary of God's promises, the seat in which he 
had chosen to fix his habitation, till the fulness of time should 
spread the expanded spirit of his mercy over all the earth, 
that they were distinguished from the rest of the world. Their 
advantages in religious knowledge, therefore, consisted in en- 
joying the full manifestations of God's natural attributes, his 
unity, power, justice and goodness, unclouded and unobscured, 
in the inheritance of those common intimations of another state 
of reward and punishment, which had descended to all the 
tribes of the earth, strengthened not only by immediate assurance 
from above, but by all the support which piety and reason 
might derive from the divine revelations, which gradually led 
to its open proclamation, in the glorious privilege of claiming 
the Messiah as a brother of their own line, and, lastly, in being 
the first to gather from the lips of the incarnate God the words 
of everlasting life ! — Warburton has said, that the doctrine of a 
future state of reward and punishment has been generally held 
to constitute the most essential part of the Mosaic dispensation. 
This perhaps is not exactly true, yet that it has been esteemed 
a very essential part of it, and that any opinion of an opposite 
description has been branded, as though it were tainted by the 
plague-spot of heresy, is undeniable. It is not too much to 
say, that such an opinion proceeds on a very imperfect under- 
standing of the genius of the two dispensations, and the 
confused and abortive efforts which its advocates have made, 
when put to the test, to define how or in what manner, or in 
what degree the doctrine in question was taught, show plainly 
enough the imbecility of a cause, erring at once against the 
sound doctrine, and without argument to give an air of plausi- 
bility to the false. Yet are there many and sufficient reasons 
why pious and learned men, removed alike from bigotry and 
fanaticism, have enrolled the debated question among the arti- 
cles of their creed, and prejudices so many, as, in default of 
strong judgment and accurate discrimination, amply to supply 
their individual weakness by their collective strength. We 
know that to God's chosen servants, under the old covenant, 
and to the Patriarchs, before its institution, peculiar revelations 

F 



66 

from above were made, and that they walked as pilgrims upon 
earth, in the assurance of a better and a heavenly country. 
The heresy of the Sadducees, which they founded on the omis- 
sion of the doctrine, as a sanction of the law, is in itself suffi- 
ciently terrifying to drive a timid mind for refuge into an op- 
posite extreme, But there are still more prejudices than these 
which might be mentioned, and, above all, a perverse misunder- 
standing of the nature of a future state, as it could alone be 
taught by natural religion, and the great and essential differ- 
ences between such a belief and that of the Christian Scrip- 
tures, which has powerfully contributed to establish a mis- 
apprehension of the fact. 



67 



CHAPTER VIII. 

Whether the omission the Doctrine as a Sanction implies the 
ignorance of it amorig the Jewish People. 

HAD Warburton confined his theory to the absence of 
the doctrine of a future state of reward and punishment 
as a sanction, — it would have rested on proofs which may 
be considered irrefragable. But the ardour of his imagination, 
the natural wish which urges all theorists to make their hypo- 
thesis round and perfect throughout, and perhaps a misgiving 
that his theory would not be demonstrable without it, joined to 
the temptation of a bold and original paradox, has induced him 
to pronounce, that from the giving of the Law to the captivity, 
the Jews had not even the same intimations of a future state, 
or the same belief in it, which the rest of the world, without 
any exception, enjoyed. This proposition seems at first sight 
to involve many assertions of a peculiar and heterodox de- 
scription, and to be surrounded, in its developement, by 
rocks and quicksands too numerous for the most accomplished 
pilot to escape. But the time included in the proposition must 
have considerable abatements, and Warburton, who is by no 
means consistent with himself on the subject, seems, in other 
places, desirous of confining it between the giving of the Law 
and the days of David. Within this period, during which the 
extraordinary Providence is confest to have been in its fullest 
action, if that Providence be granted to have been an equal 
one, it is undoubtedly least objectionable, and in any case, or 
in any view of the question, the ignorance of the doctrine is to 
be confined to the mass of the people. And as the question is 
cleared by Warburton himself of all interference with the 
patriarchal faith, the belief of Moses himself, or even with the 
effect produced by the approximation of the two covenants, 
when the aspect of the Law was transfigured by its communing 
with the glories of Christianity, it is confined within a compa- 



68 

ratively narrow and unimportant compass. Important, indeed, 
only in one respect, so far, namely, as concerns the means, which 
Warburton has employed, to elicit from the silence or equivocal 
declarations of Holy Writ an absolute confirmation to his opi- 
nion. The mass of mankind must have acquired the doctrine 
by one of two means, either by their own reason, or tradition 
handed down from the primitive race. Let it be granted, for 
the sake of argument, that they had reached it through the 
efforts of their own reason. The method by which they would 
have inferred the fact of another existence, would be the con- 
trast between the necessary attributes of God, and the inequa- 
lities of Providence in this present state ; from the comparison 
of which would have resulted the conclusion, that the vindica- 
tion of the Almighty's unchangeable justice and goodness de- 
manded a future state of being, wherein to demonstrate their 
perfection. But as Warburton asserts an equal Providence, and 
uses the words equal and extraordinary as perfectly synonimous, 
the people, who lived under its constant administration, would be 
debarred from that evidence of another state of existence which 
has just been mentioned, and, the perfect distribution of good 
and evil being already made, the satisfied mind would look no 
farther. Mr. Lancaster has argued the matter, however, at great 
length, and has most satisfactorily shown, that the two terms in 
question are far from meaning the same thing, and that Scrip- 
ture affords us no warrant for the existence of that equal dis- 
tribution of good and evil, for which Warburton so vehemently 
contends. Indeed, that writer himself does not assume that 
confident tone on the subject, which is in most cases character- 
istic of his assertions, but has something deprecatory of a strict 
interpretation, which displays a consciousness of weakness. — 
Yet nothing but the most exact interpretation, and the most 
literal acceptation of the terms is sufficient for his argument, 
and whilst the least opening remains for the ordinary inequa- 
lities of Providence, his conclusion falls inevitably to the ground. 
Had the obedience of the Jewish people, indeed, to the ordi- 
nances of the Almighty been more perfect, the universal pros- 
perity which would have resulted from such obedience, and 



69 

the covenanted blessings which, without bound or measure, 
would have crowned the temporal condition of the chosen race, 
and made the rocks of Canaan an earthly Paradise, would, by 
removing all inequality, have nearly brought about the result, 
which Warburton has taken for granted. But so far is this 
from being the case, that the annals of that extraordinary people 
are written in darkness and in blood. — On the one hand, we see a 
hard-hearted and rebellious race, dead to the incessant miracles 
among which they lived, heaping crime on crime, and idolatry 
on idolatry; and on the other, a wrathful and alienated God, 
stretching out his right hand to plague and to avenge, and speak- 
ing, not with the still small voice of mercy, but with the thunder- 
ings of outraged and indignant majesty; judgment treads on 
the heels of judgment, war on pestilence, slavery on war, till, 
scourged by the visitations of heaven into an acknowledgment 
of their guilt, the chosen race bowed too late to the Divinity of 
their Law, clung with desperate fondness to the ruins of a dis- 
pensation, which had gained its purpose by the vengeance it 
had entailed upon them, and, as luckless in their intended obe- 
dience as in their perverse rebellion, hurled a second time 
defiance at the Almighty, by the rejection and persecution of 
the covenant of life. Now it was the peculiar genius of the 
Jewish Law, that it involved the innocent in unavoidable ruin 
with the guilty, and the mouth of God himself entailed the 
punishment of the fathers on the children, and made his curse, 
as well as his blessing, descend to the third and fourth genera- 
tion. The operation, therefore, of the sanctions of the law pre- 
sented more signal and striking examples of inequality, in the 
distributions of Providence, to the eyes of an Hebrew, than the 
ordinary course of human events could have offered to the rest 
of the world. For the vengeance instantly descended on the 
offence, and as such offence, though the act of an individual, 
was permitted to extend its fatal consequences far and wide, as 
a public sin, the angry visitation invariably involved a fearful 
number of the innocent in its sweep. When the earth opened 
to swallow up Corah and his company, it joined their wives 
and children in the same tomb; the transgression of Achan fell 



70 

on the innocent camp, and the sin of David called down the 
destroying Angel on his unoffending people. The reasoning, 
therefore, in this case, which would lead to the doctrine of ano- 
ther world, where these contradictions would be solved, and 
this antithesis to God's goodness reconciled with its opposite, 
is direct and unavoidable. For it is wholly unincumbered by 
any of those doubts and misgivings, which must have sprung 
from an imperfect apprehension of the moral attributes of God, 
and which would effectually prevent the mind of a heathen 
from arriving, with certainty, at such a conclusion. The ap- 
parent injustice of such an enactment, as that which visits on 
the child the transgression of the father, would be instantly 
removed by the belief in a future state ; and those murmurs, 
which Ezekiel records against the inequality of God's dispen- 
sations, appear rather to mark the first dawn of Atheistical 
principles among the Jews, than the previous absence of the 
belief in question, as Warburton would interpret them to mean, 
and seem utterly inconsistent with the notion, that from thence 
is to be dated the period, when the general faith in a future 
state began to gain ground among them. Warburton again has 
urged the law, which involves the child in the guilt of its parent, 
as another strong proof of the temporal sanctions of the Mosaic 
dispensation, and as a farther means to supply the absence of a 
future state by an appeal to the natural passions, and this appa- 
rently with considerable reason. That it was one of the striking 
and separating differences in the provisions of the two covenants, 
that it did really exist in the first, and was repealed in the 
second, is proved, beyond controversy, by the declarations of 
Jeremiah and Ezekiel. This variance, between Moses and the 
later prophets, has been urged strongly and confidently against 
them by Collins and Spinoza ; and there have been Christian 
Divines, who, in the heat of their resentment against Warbur- 
ton, have overlooked at once the discrepancy and its solution, 
and have asserted that, in this respect, the Christian and the 
Mosaic dispensations did not recognize any distinction of sanc- 
tions whatever. But this is the very madness of controversy ; 
and it was reserved for Doctor Rutherworth to hazard the ex- 



71 

traordinary assertion, that temporal rewards were promised in 
quite as great a degree in the Gospel as in the Law — an assertion 
at least as remarkable for its incredible repugnance to truth, as 
the temerity which could unequivocally urge it against the 
Author of the Divine Legation. It is plain, however, that the 
extraordinary distribution of reward and punishment did not 
exclude great and manifest inequality ; and to have carried it 
into effect, in that perfect and consistent manner, which is alone 
compatible with the divine intention to have done so at all; to 
have discriminated, not only between the good and the bad, 
but between the innumerable shades and minute differences 
which unite the two extremes, and to have apportioned to each 
his just and appropriate reward, offer difficulties too innumera- 
ble, and contradictions too irreconcileable,to exist without a total 
change in the system of divine administration. Now the differ- 
ence between the Jewish Nation and the rest of the world con- 
sisted, not in an exemption from those invariable laws, and that 
admixture of good and evil, to which all in a greater or less degree 
are subject. But it lay in this, that the post of Legislator and 
King was occupied by God himself, and the rewards and pu- 
nishments, which were the sanction of his law, carried into ef- 
fect by the immediate interposition of his own hand. But he 
dealt with the Jews, as ordinary Legislators do with their sub- 
jects, with wisdom, the same in kind, but differing in degree. 
He drew them " with the cords of a man," acted upon them 
by the same motives and the same passions, his laws wqi'e ge- 
neral like theirs, often unavoidably involved the innocent with 
the guilty, and only so far preserved an equality of distribu- 
tion, as his own unchangeable constitution of things permitted, 
infinitely farther, indeed, than mere human wisdom could have 
done, but still with an evident and observable imperfection. — 
But even were it granted, that the Jews enjoyed a perfectly 
equal Providence, themselves, yet they had too much intercourse 
with the surrounding nations to be ignorant, that they at least 
were living under an unequal dispensation, and, as their own 
scriptures taught them, that Jehovah was, not a mere Titelary 
Diety, but the God of heaven and earth, they must still have 



72 

felt the necessity of a future state. Even had their view been 
confined to their own little world, had they possessed to the 
full the promised blessings, and, consequently, as their only 
condition, maintained unbroken their allegiance to God, the 
imperfections of our nature, its infinite instincts, its unbounded 
capacities, the sentence of death united with the promise of the 
Messiah, must have led them to the same conclusion. It fol- 
lows, therefore, that, if the rest of the world could have them- 
selves reached the doctrine, the Jews, who had the same 
contradictions before their eyes, and infinitely greater advan- 
tages to lead them, without difficulty, to the truth, could not in 
possibility have been ignorant of it. But we need not have 
reasoned upon this supposition — for the fact is, that the soul's 
immortality, and a state of future reward and punishment, was 
not the discovery of the human intellect, and the mind of man 
was too weak for the undertaking. And yet there is but one 
alternative. For either Tradition, as has been more than once 
observed, received the doctrines from our first Parents, and be- 
queathed them to succeeding generations, till the legendary 
story, taking root and quickening in the ineffaceable instincts of 
every bosom of every nation, caused altars to smoke, temples to 
stand, and worshippers to tremble, wherever the sun rises or sets j 
or else the human intellect, by the exertion of its own energies, 
first penetrated to the great^Cause, and then, by the contemp- 
lation of its relations with our own state and the present order 
of things, scattered the darkness that is settled over them, read, 
with prophetic reason, the mighty enigma, and triumphed in 
the ascertainment of its future destinies. But if the voice of An- 
tiquity be a competent witness on the question, its faith was 
wholly traditionary, its creed had descended from father to son, 
and it was not till a very late period, comparatively speaking, 
that Pherecydes attempted to rest the immortality of the soul 
on the ground of speculative reasoning. To the mass of man- 
kind such an inquiry had been impertinent ; the instincts and 
the passion of faith, not the calculations of belief, to reason as 
they feel, not to feel as they reason, was and ever will be the 
lot of the majority of the human race, and to them therefore 



73 

the speculations of philosophy, on a subject already decided 
upon different grounds, and of which the very existence of 
such speculations confessed the belief, would be either unin- 
telligible, or, if understood, would weigh with them but as 
dust in the great balance. But subtler understandings were not 
to be so satisfied, and Philosophy was weak, where Nature was 
strong ; she became entangled in her own sophistries, resting 
her wisdom on the chicane of words, she reached not the rea- 
lity of things ; playing on the surface, she failed where depths 
were to be sounded ; in the coldness of her vanity, she had not 
the enthusiasm for moral truth ; she prophaned the noblest of 
human sentiments by her feeble aid ; and in the attempt to de- 
monstrate the immortality of the soul, Plato, the sublimest of her 
Sons, has reared the monument of her folly. Indeed, if we wished 
to show the inadequacy of the unaided intellect to the task in ques- 
tion, we would bid the mind, that is sceptical on the point, to pe- 
ruse the Phaedon of Plato. In spite of the witchcraft of that 
exquisite composition, its deep interest, and its inimitable graces 
of thought and expression, we must confess, in the contemptible 
metaphysics and puerile argumentation of the sublimest of Pagan 
Philosophers, the powerlessness of that reason, of which He may 
be considered the embodied representative. Whether reason, 
under other circumstances, and a different direction of its powers, 
easily definable by our own superior Jight, might not have demon- 
strated the doctrine, is a question wholly irrelevant to the dis- 
cussion. Certain it is that it did not, and no less certain is it, 
that, in the direction of proof which it had chosen, and to which 
the peculiar genius of ancient philosophy inextricably confined 
it, it could not have met with a different result. The schools of 
Antiquity numbered not, among their disciples, any contempla- 
tive Philosopher, any moralizing Sage, who, like our own Ad- 
dison, could build a better system on the unbounded faculties, 
the mysterious cravings, and indistinct graspings at another 
existence, which mark the Godlike, though fallen, spirit of man. 
By this line of reasoning, they might not only have confirmed 
the natural belief of mankind, but have fortified it with a mo- 
ral demonstration ; but they overlooked these attributes of their 



74 

nature, and blinded themselves in that darkness of metaphysics, 
wherein were engendered those errors, the very abortions of rea- 
son, which made impossible the proof of immortality, or connected 
its belief with a train of impieties, which rendered scepticism 
itself comparatively innocent ! The doctrines in debate, there- 
fore, were not the discovery of reason, but were originally the gift 
of God himself, and dispersed, by succeeding tradition, through- 
out the world. The early dispensations of Providence too had an 
especial view to this belief; the blood of Abel from the ground, 
the voice of translated Enoch from above, weretrumpet-tongued, 
in attestation of its truth, to the antediluvian world ; the fiery 
ascension of Elijah in after days, and the connection between 
the promise of the Messiah, and the removal of the primeval 
curse, all these, and more than these, not severed into uncon- 
nected fragments, not floating in the mists of tradition, but ga- 
thered, condensed, and harmonized, hour after hour^rung 
into the ears of the chosen people, and aided by the mani- 
festation and revealed attributes of a present God, must have 
stamped indelibly, on the popular creed of the Israelites, 
the belief in a future state. That part of Mr. Lancaster's book, 
in which he has treated this question, is, perhaps, in the learn- 
ing which it displays, and the argument it employs, the most 
elaborate part of his work. He has, beyond question, shown, 
that Warburton has erred, and even dangerously erred, in his 
unjustifiable tampering with scripture, in this part of the Di- 
vine Legation. It may, perhaps, be invidious to remark on in- 
considerable blemishes, amidst so much merit; yet one can 
hardly help noticing a secret and scarce defined disposition to 
paradox, which he has caught from the study of his great mas- 
ter. This amounts to a degree of weakness, when he would 
insist, even in the remotest degree, on the constant apparition 
of spirits, as a mode of revealing another state to the antedilu- 
vian race, and certainly to unsoundness of reasoning, when he 
would argue, that the human mind, though it could of itself 
form an idea of future punishment, yet could not originate the 
notion of future reward, because it could not have known the 
true grounds on which alone it could be accorded to mankind. 



75 

His reasoning is powerful enough without such assistance, and 
in a cause so strong, it had been better to have called in no feeble 
or equivocal aid. It is such books after all, as Mr. Lancaster's, 
that enlarge our conceptions of the Divine Legation, the lite- 
rary Coliseum, out of whose materials so many noble structures 
have been built. For when we have deducted all the learning 
which he has derived from that repository, and the numerous 
hints which he has only expanded, the quantity of original 
thought and composition, which remains behind, is not incon- 
siderably diminished, yet enough still is left to render "the Har- 
mony between the Law and the Gospel" valuable to all, who can 
estimate sound erudition, strong judgment, acute reasoning, 
and unaffected piety; and as it becomes better known, it will 
probably hold the first rank among the efforts that have been 
made to elucidate the Warburtonian controversy, and settle the 
limits of the question ! 



76 



CHAPTER IX. 

Tenth book of the Divine Legation — the subject of primitive sa- 
crifice. 

THE Divine Legation is an imperfect work, and of the se- 
venth and eighth books, we have nothing more than a few frag- 
ments remaining, the sketches of a master hand, the comple- 
tion of which, sorrow, infirmities, and the spiritlessness of a 
desponding old age denied to its author and to the world. The 
tenth and last book, however, was nearly completed by Warbur- 
ton, and is pronounced by Hurd, to be the most successful ef- 
fort ever made by the human mind, to give a rationale of Chris- 
tianity. We would not be in the number of those, who would 
shelter their own imbecility, under an affected horror of novel 
exposition, nor silence inquiry, by branding it as experiment in 
religion; we would not found our belief in a doctrine, as some 
have boasted, in its impossibility, nor go so far as to say, that a 
religion, without mysteries, were as worthless, as a temple with- 
out a god; yet it must be confessed, that there is so much dan- 
ger lest we receive the rebuke of the Prophet, ' ' that it is holy 
ground," that even a satisfactory and intelligible exposition of 
the mysteries of our faith were less pleasing to Christian humi- 
lity than, like the Seraphim, to veil its face before the Throne, 
and tremble in silent adoration. Warburton, perhaps, has achiev- 
ed as much, as any human intellect could be expected to do, in so 
unequal a task; but so much hypothesis is mingled with theexpo- 
sition, such large demands are made upon our understanding, 
in its very conditions, and we are introduced into so much that 
is extravagantly wild, in the supposition of a religious state of 
our first parents, antecedently to their settlement in Paradise, 
that we choose rather to enlarge the limits of our faith, than 
those of our reason. Yet in one point of view, and with re- 
ference to infidel objections, such an attempt, by such a man, is 
not without its advantages. Arguments against Christianity, 



77 

drawn from what we know not, may fairly be answered by sup- 
positions in its favour derived from the same source, and that, 
o£ which man, by his own limited faculties can imagine a pos- 
sible solution, we may be sure with God is the result of infinite 
wisdom, and will one day be seen by ourselves to square with 
a better, and more extended reason than our own. In the pre- 
sent state of religious and controversial feeling, when the ori- 
gin of primitive sacrifice has called forth so many combatants, 
on both sides of the question, the most interesting portion of 
the ninth book of the Divine Legation is that, which contains 
the hypothesis of Warburton upon the subject. It is full, con- 
sistent, and complete, as the ardour of the Theorist would lead 
us to anticipate ; as boldly urged, as the confidence of the Dog- 
matist would prescribe ; and, though shortly stated, as power- 
fully delineated, as the strength and eloquence of the Advocate 
would demand. He thinks that human feelings might have 
suggested the rite, that human reason might then have ap- 
proved it, and that human ingenuity is still more than enough 
satisfactorily to explain it. In the imperfection of the primi- 
tive tongue he seeks for the key of the mystery ; and from the 
inability of the early worshippers to unfold their feelings in 
words, and the ardour of natural passion delighting in gestures 
and external signs, he sees in sacrifice only a scenic language, 
a symbolic liturgy, to which he has affixed such an interpreta- 
tion, as seemed to him most favourable to the human original of 
the custom. To this opinion he has stated no modifications, he 
has made no exceptions, but refers all sacrifices alike, of every 
description, whether eucharistic, deprecatory or atoning, to 
the invention of man. This is not the only occasion, on which 
Warburton has called in the nature of the early language to 
assist him in the interpretation of Scripture meanings, and the 
solution of Scripture difficulties. Feeling rather than thinking, 
seeking to communicate rather sentiments in the mass, than 
ideas in detail, nations in the first stages of their existence ex- 
pressed rather than spoke, and with gestures in conversation, 
pictures in writing, and symbolic representations in both, 
sought, in the vivid and general and unequivocal language of 



78 

nature, to supply the absence of conventional signs. The ad- 
mirable success of Warburton, in applying this key to the solu- 
tion of hieroglyphical language, and the success with which he 
has traced in coincident lines, the history of speech and writ- 
ing, has been already observed. If, therefore, elated by the 
triumphant application of this test in other cases, he has been 
hurried too far in his explanation of Abraham's sacrifice, as 
seems probable, or in sacrifice generally, as seems certain, 
there is little room for wonder, and none for severe animad- 
version. There is something in the rite of sacrifice itself, in 
the universality of the custom, in this bleeding proof of a san- 
guinary or an offended Deity, something in the undoubting re- 
ception of a practice, in its symbolical sense a mystery to the 
believer, in its actual infliction, a discord to the feelings of the 
man, and in both, a stumbling-block to the sceptic, which, 
even as a matter of curious inquiry, is a most interesting fea- 
ture in the religious history of the world. Accompanied, from 
its first mention in Holy Writ, by the most decisive proofs of 
the divine approbation, as a mode of worship, instituted by Je- 
hovah himself, as the very essence of the Mosaic Covenant, the 
chief symbol in that ritual of shadows, and, in the stupendous 
reality of a bleeding God, the beginning, middle, and end of 
the Christian Faith, sacrifice undoubtedly at Jirst sight comes 
home to our feelings, as an institution necessarily of divine ori- 
ginal. Yet there have not been wanting both pious and emi- 
nent theologians, at all periods, who have advocated its human 
institution, and, despite of religious warmth, and controver- 
sial acrimony, an opinion held by the majority of the Christian 
fathers, can be hardly charged with novelty, or a judgment 
from such men as Spencer, Warburton, and Davison, be ar- 
raigned of absurdity. Were we, moreover, to judge of the me- 
rits of the question, by the tone assumed by the writers, on each 
side of the dispute, we should not hesitate, for an instant, in sid- 
ing with the argument for its human institution. For, what- 
ever be the judgment delivered on the question itself, there 
can be but one opinion on the calm, temperate, and truly 
Christian spirit, which breathes through the remarks of Mr. 



79 

Benson and Mr. Davison on the subject ; whilst in the other 
party, and particularly in a late publication of Mr. Moles- 
worth, there is a temerity of assertion and a fulness of contro- 
versial spirit, which savours more of bigotry, startled in its 
hiding-place, than Christian feeling anxious for the truth, of a 
fiery partizan, rather than a disinterested inquirer. On one 
only supposition could zeal justly kindle into an indignant 
tone — on the supposition, namely, that the human origin of the 
rite necessarily implied that sacrifice had always an atoning in- 
tention, and that this intention referred the discovery of the 
Messiah's future sacrifice to the efforts of human reason. Such 
has generally been the supposed connexion between the two 
propositions, that the advocates for its divine original have 
taken it for granted, and indeed, were the human discovery 
of that mystery really included in the other fact, no dispassion- 
ate inquirer could hesitate in his decision. But here it may be 
well to observe, that, at least, a great proportion of the support- 
ers of its divine institution have loosened the ground under 
their own feet, and, by pressing the matter too far, have ren- 
dered it very possible, that the rite may have had an atoning 
meaning, been humanly ordained, and yet wholly exclude the 
alledged impiety. It has been the fashion in theology, and par- 
ticularly among those, who advocate the divine original of sa- 
crifices, to enlarge, certainly beyond the information of the 
written word, the bounds of the primitive faith, and to accu- 
mulate doctrine on doctrine, revelation on revelation, till, as 
Mr. Molesworth unequivocally states, all gradation in the di- 
vine scheme is destroyed, and at least as much becomes known 
immediately after the fall, as when the fulness of time was 
come. Let us suppose then, which, on such principles, is no 
extravagant assumption, that our first parents, and from them 
their children, had been divinely informed of the manner in 
which the victory over the serpent was to be achieved, and all 
difficulty is at an end. The knowledge of the Saviour's sacri- 
fice institutes an immediate connexion between the typical and 
real offering, a connexion, striking, easy, and most obvious to 
reason; and the constitution of such a rite by man, becomes at 



80 

once a striking symbol of his contrition, his humiliation, and 
his faith. It has been reasoned, however, that man had no 
right, without God's permission, over the life of his creatures, 
and that it had been a sin, therefore, without such warrant, to 
have taken it from unoffending beings. That it was justifi- 
able, however, the very permission proves ; and when we consi- 
der the large terms of the chartered dominion, over the lower 
animals, conferred on man ; when we consider that their blood 
had been already shed by the Divine Authority, in order 
to furnish clothing, that we do not even know that the num- 
ber sacrificed was greater than what the mere clothing might 
demand, it is somewhat hazardous to assert, that reason might 
not have discovered, that what was right, in one case, was 
justifiable in another, and that what was innocent, for the ser- 
vice of man, was not unlawful for the worship of God. Be- 
sides, in what has been said on this part of the subject, there is 
sickly sentimentality;, a coxcombry of humanity, which is as 
displeasing to true feeling, as it is affected, in the eye of true 
reason. Much too has been said, and with no little confidence, on 
the impiety of will-worship, which has been argued against 
the possible acceptability of such an offering as that of a sacri- 
ficed victim, in the sight of the Almighty. But if there is a 
connection, in the natural constitution of things, between cer- 
tain outward forms, and certain inward feelings and relations, 
and some of those connections, with their feelings, are quite 
within the reach of our own reason ; if, moreover, God gives 
not supernatural information except where reason, his un- 
doubted voice, as far as it goes, is too weak to guide us ; if to 
neglect such information of our understandings would be as 
guilty, in the eye of Heaven, as to act upon such suggestion, 
with humility and faith, would be meritorious ; if, moreover, 
by the data on which we have been proceeding, the rite and 
meaning, in the present instance, are so connected as they have 
been stated to be, we can easily see, why God might approve 
that which, through the medium of his implanted monitor, He 
may himself be said to have ordained. But let us quit this 
line of argument, and take the question under that point of 



81 

view, in which its advocates and opponents have themselves 
placed it. Mr. Davison has devoted no inconsiderable part of 
his elaborate work to the purpose of showing, that primitive 
sacrifice, as far as we judge from the existing evidence, did 
not include the notion of atonement ; and that as there were 
confessedly sacrifices of other descriptions, which might there' 
fore in the present case have-Jbeen used, and those sacrifices 
sanctioned by God's appros*A, and therefore acceptable in his 
sight, the primitive sacrifices, as far as we can discriminate 
their distinctive character, might have belonged, and did really 
belong, to other classes, than that of atoning offerings. Two 
questions here present themselves — 1. Could it in any, than that 
of an atoning sense, have recommended itself to natural reason, 
as an appropriate mode of worship ? — 2. Was that reason justi- 
fied in so doing, unauthorised and uncommanded ? — In regard 
to the second difficulty, since the unjustifiable nature of the 
rite could only have lain in the act of slaying the animal, and 
in the appearance of will-worship, it may be considered, in 
some degree, already answered. Particularly when we reflect, 
that all reasoning against the human origin of sacrifice, found- 
ed on the charge of will- worship, applies with equal strength to 
prayer, fasting, and all humanly instituted forms of worship 
without exception, however reconcileable with reason and with 
piety they may be ; and that such arguments, therefore, carry 
with them the conviction of their own absurdity, and in prov- 
ing too much, prove, in reality, nothing at all. In regard to the 
first and only remaining question, Mr. Davison has eloquently 
stated his own case, and interpretated the scenic liturgy, into 
what he thinks a most strong and rational representation of the 
worshipper's humility and his penitence, and his consciousness 
of deserving that death, the sentence of which still rung, like 
a knell, in the ears of the exiles from Paradise ! Mr. Benson 
sees in an acknowledgment of the blessing, which God had be- 
stowed in the shape of raiment, an adequate explanation of the 
rite, and a reasonable motive for building an altar for sacrifice. 
Whatever may be thought of the plausibility of the latter ex- 
position, it shows, at all events, most satisfactorily, that there is 

G 



82 

•more than one point of view, in which Sacrifice recommends it- 
self, as a reasonable and intelligible service, to minds and in- 
tellects of no ordinary piety to feel, and no vulgar capacity to 
judge. And here, in truth, the question rests, and must rest 
for ever- — for whilst one party sees sufficient reason in this 
method of institution, the other vehemently retorts its unrea- 
sonableness. As it here, therefore, becomes a matter of personal 
feeling, and nothing, but the peculiar intellectual constitution 
of each individual, can determine a preference, it is utterly im- 
possible to decide the dispute; and as both parties must reason 
with an utter discrepancy in their very first principles, they 
may of course debate for ever without coming to a satisfactory 
conclusion, and much acrimony will be displayed, where acri- 
mony ought to have no part, and much ingenious argument 
wasted, where argument can be of little avail. The scriptural 
authority, which can be brought to bear upon the question, is 
too evenly balanced, to permit either party to rely much upon 
it ; and Mr. Davison has done much in confining it within its 
proper limits, and thus considerably narrowing the grounds of 
debate. As to its first institution, the voice of scripture is ab- 
solutely dumb ; and when we consider the mention which is 
made of the sabbath, the at least equal importance of the sub- 
ject of sacrifice, and yet the total silence of holy writ upon it 
the few words in which the information might have been con- 
veyed, and how naturally it might have been introduced, the 
silence is, most undoubtedly, as far as such a circumstance goes, 
against its Divine Original. Certainly, no fair or plausible rea- 
son has yet been assigned for its omission, under such circum- 
stances ; unless we admit Mr. Molesworth's extravagant as- 
sumption, that its absence from holy writ proves it to be self- 
evident, and that the opponents of its Divine institution are 
bound by the rules of reasoning, to quote God's own words 
for its human institution. It has not been sufficiently observed, 
however, that if sacrifice was ordained by God, it had, whe- 
ther that sense was revealed or not, an atoning meaning; that 
it consequently becomes a splendid prophecy; and, if so, much 
too important in its connection with the promise of the 



83 

Messiah, too strong to interpret the cotemporary prediction, too 
striking in its twin-like and parallel existence, too powerful to 
show, that the course of revelation was not so gradual, as the 
rest of scripture proves it to have been, to allow its omission 
in the records of the antediluvian faith. The Almighty, as 
far as we can discover, seems not to have so precipitated the 
current of his counsels ; and it is no disparagement to infinite 
goodness, to have left the first promise of the Deliverer to be 
the mysterious, but still certain object of indefinite faith, till the 
altar of his covenant was prepared for the great prophetic sym- 
bol, and a Priesthood hallowed to sprinkle it with the figura- 
tive shedding of the Redeemer's blood. Nor does the transfer 
of a rite which, if humanly instituted, was divinely approved, 
into an especial ritual, at all affect the dignity of an ordinance, 
the connection between which and the thing represented was 
the result of God's own constituted laws. And when it is added 
that, on this transfer, a new and mysterious meaning was af- 
fixed to it, unknown before ; that it became the awful type of 
types; and that the atoning efficacy of blood is then, for the first 
time, announced, announced from Heaven and else indiscover- 
able by man, the edge of any objection, on this score, is consi- 
derably blunted. To speak, therefore, of the Advocates of its 
human institution, as of persons who represent God as stealing 
the inventions of man, is a polemic artifice, unworthy of the 
candour of Christians on one hand, and the fairness of ho- 
nourable disputants on the other. The reasonings, which 
would fain elicit scriptural authority from the disputed text in 
Genesis, and much that has been said, on the celebrated chap- 
ter in the Hebrews, are really nothing more than a Petitio 
Principii, and so far is either the one or the other from proving 
the point in debate, that it is only by taking the point for 
granted, that they have been so interpreted. One reflection 
on the question is sufficiently obvious, that, whilst we cannot 
deny that there may have been good reasons for the omission of 
the Divine institution (if such were the case) which we know 
not of, we do know, that the fact of that omission may permit 
a difference of opinion without reflecting ought on the heart of 



84 

the believer, or the understanding of the man. And at a 
moment, when the Unitarian heresy strikes so boldly at the 
very root of our faith, and tramples under foot the Cross of 
the Christian Sacrifice, any thing which can sow dissention in 
the ranks of orthodoxy, by idly traducing its best defenders, 
or exaggerating unimportant differences into the watch- words 
of party, is to be deprecated with a view to policy ; anything 
that wantonly increases the mystery, or heightens the natural 
unreasonableness of the doctrine of Atonement, is to be avoided 
with a view to argument ; and anything, which overstrains 
scriptural proof, or grounds doctrine on aught but scriptural 
authority, to be shunned with a view to our faith, which it may 
taint, and to the integrity of its defence, which it will undoubt- 
edly destroy. 

J. Garbett, 

Brasen-Nose, Oxford. 



BLACKWOOD'S 



EDINBURGH MAGAZINE. 



No XLV. 



DEC 



SCE^IBER 1820. 



Vol. VIII. 



ON THE LITERARY CHARACTERS OF BISHOP WARBURTON AND DR JOHNSON. 



The two greatest men of the last cen- 
tury in our national literature, the 
greatest in comprehensiveness of mind 
and variety of talent, were undoubted- 
ly Bishop Warburton and Dr Johnson. 
For a long period of time, they exer- 
cised a kind of joint domination over 
the republic of letters— a dominion 
which, in the former, chiefly arose 
fram the hardy and unshrinking defi- 
ance of public opinion he exhibited, 
backed by extraordinary intellectual 
force and vigour ; and, in the latter, 
had its origin in the universal awe and 
veneration his genius and character 
had excited. In the one, it was a tri- 
bute which fear of an immediate con- 
sequent castigation compelled all to 
pay ; in the other, it was an homage 
more voluntary, because less enforced, 
to powers of the highest magnitude, 
and virtue of the most unblemished 
purity. The one, accounting dissent 
from his favourite theories as a crime of 
the blackest dye, punished all non- 
conformists to the idol he had set up 
with a most merciless measure of pains 
and penalties; while the latter, possess- 
ing, indeed, not less of haughtiness and 
irritability, but more of prudence, had 
the good sense to leave to public opi- 
nion his justification against the at- 
tacks of his enemies. This joint and 
equal literary supremacy, notwith- 
standing that it was occasionally dis- 
turbed by frequent murmurings of 
jealousy in the former, and growlings 



of fearless opposition in the latter, 
continued, without being shaken by 
intestine division, till the former had 
lost, in inanity and dotage, his great 
mental acuteness and strength, — and 
thus the latter had, by the departure of 
his rival, become the sole literary po- 
tentate of his country. Time, how- 
ever, which as frequently consigns to 
neglect the meritorious productions of 
literature, as it showers down an in- 
crease of fame on the compositions of 
deserving genius, has long since quiet- 
ed the bustle which the pen of War- 
burton always excited in his lifetime ; 
and his name, once numbered amongst 
the mighty of the earth, has been for 
sometime subjected to a partial if not 
total neglect. As the Roman Catho- 
lic church treated the bones of Wick- 
lifFe with contumely, whom, living, 
they could not overcome ; so the pub- 
lic seem determined to revenge up- 
on Warburton, when dead, the con- 
tempt they experienced from his 
haughtiness, and the unwillingly-paid 
devotion which he enforced to his 
powers when living. And in the 
length of time which has elapsed from 
the period of his decease to the pre- 
sent day, many a kick has been in- 
flicted on the dead lion by animals 
who could not have dared to approach 
him while capable of defending and 
revenging himself.* Popular hostili- 
ty, as well as private, ought, however, 
to give place to candid examination 



« Amonest these, sse one Watkins, the author of a book called Anecdotes of distin- 
guished Characters ; who, in a note to the work, would fain persuade us that Warburton 1 
was merely a man of great and extensive reading, without intellect, acuteness, or wit. 

Vol. VIII, 2 H 



244 

and allowance; and when exercised 
against a deserving subject, will only, 
in the end, reflect disgrace upon itself 
for an unworthy exercise of power. 
The fame of Warburton must, there- 
fore, at length experience a renewal of 
its brightness ; and though perhaps 
shorn of some of its beams, will re- 
ceive its merited due at the hands of 
posterity. A very different effect has 
time had over the fame of his great 
competitor : its only influence has been 
in showering down additional lustre 
on the name of Samuel Johnson, and 
giving to it that fixed and permanent 
basis and foundation which it is only 
for posterity to bestow. The best 
proof which can be given of the exten- 
sive circulation of his writings, is the 
visible effect which they have had over 
literature and criticism ; and the in- 
con testible assistance they have afford- 
ed to the great march of the human 
mind : while the works of Warburton 
stand unnumbered amongst the stand- 
ard productions in theology and criti- 
cism ; and his great work, the Divine 
Legation, remains, to use the words of 
Gibbon, " a monument crumbling in 
the dust of the vigour and weakness 
of the human mind." As there is, I 
believe, no writing extant in which 
the merits of these extraordinary men 
have been made the subject of compa- 
rative criticism, though certainly the 
most alike in the peculiarities of their 
mental character of any of the literary 
worthies of their age, the most equal 
in force of intellect and universality of 
power, — an examination and inquiry 
into their respective talents and cha- 
racters may not be without its parti- 
cular benefit. It will, at least, be of 
use in displaying how far it is possible 
for abilities the most splendid to se- 
duce their possessor to extravagance 
in the search for originality ; and how 
transient and momentary is the fame 
of paradoxical ingenuity, when com- 
pared with that which rests on the 
immobility of established truth ! 

To the peculiar education of War- 
burton, may be ascribed most of the 
peculiarities of his character. Him- 
self, at first, an obscure provincial at- 
torney, undisciplined in the regular 
course of academical study ; and re- 
fused, when he had even risen to ce- 
lebrity, a common academical honour; 
owing none of the varied exuberance 
of his knowledge to professors or pro- 
fessorships, to universities or colleges ; 



On the Literary Characters of 



CDec. 



he naturally cherished a secret dislike 
to the regular disciplinarians of learn- 
ing ; and it was, at once, his delight 
and his pride to confound the followers 
of the beaten path in study, by recon- 
dite and variously sparkling erudition 
— to oppose himself to whole cohorts 
of the standard corps of literature, in 
the confidence of his own individual 
power; to strike out new paths in 
learning, and open new vistas in know- 
ledge, with the rapidity of an enchant- 
er ; to demolish the old and station- 
ary structures of theology and litera- 
ture, and overturn them from their 
foundations, for the purpose of erect- 
ing his own novelties in their stead, 
which supplied what they wanted of so- 
lidity, by speciousness and splendour ; 
and to daazle and astound the sup- 
porters of established principles and 
maxims, by combating them with a 
force of reason, and strength of logic, 
which was, perhaps, as unexampled 
as it was audacious. His learning and 
his mental powers were equally esta- 
blished without assistance, and his 
haughtiness loved to shew how his 
inbred mental vigour had triumphed 
over difficulties. From the same source 
arose both the excellencies and defects 
of his character. No pruning hand 
had ever been exerted to remove the 
excrescencies which had been genera- 
ted in his mind, and to tame and so- 
ber the wildness and extravagance with 
which it was so often overshadowed. 
Thus his intellect rose up in rough 
and unshorn mightiness, and with it 
the pullulating seeds of sophistical in- 
genuity which grew with itsgrowth, and 
strengthened with its strength, till at 
last he became an inveterate and radi- 
cated system-monger, and his mind a 
repositary, where every subject in the- 
ology, criticism, or literature, had an 
hypothesis ready prepared for it. Nor 
less powerful in its influence, on his 
character, was the first reception he 
met with in literature, — in the univer- 
sal war, which seemed, at his first rise, 
to be proclaimed against him. That 
his innovating and paradoxical spirit 
should procure him many adversaries, 
was hardly to be doubted, but, as if 
the hypotheses he advanced were mat- 
ters of established belief, he resented 
every departure from them, as a de- 
parture from truth itself; and his 
ungovernable haughtiness, and impa- 
tience of contradiction, flamed out in 
angry defiance against his opposers, 



1820.;] 



Bishop Warburton and Dr Johnson. 



and overwhelmed them with an over- 
powering torrent of scurrility and 
abuse, which was served by an in- 
expugnable force of argument, and 
strengthened by an unequalled promp- 
titude of wit. From these primary 
circumstances, his mind received an 
indelible impression ; and from his 
first advance to greatness, to his last 
approach to imbecility, he was the 
same, and unchanged ; the same con- 
structor of systems, the same desperate 
controversialist, the same dogmatical 
decider, the same determined oppugn- 
er of whatever authority had sanc- 
tioned in theology, or common sense 
established in taste. The resources 
of his ingenuity were not exhausted 
by time — the severity of his pen was 
not composed by age — and Lowth, on 
whom his last attack was made, was 
no less fated than his first antagonist, 
Tillard, to receive the overflowings of 
his gall. 

The character of Dr Johnson was, 
perhaps, not less influenced by exter- 
nal circumstances, but they had much 
less influence on the purely intellec- 
tual part of it. If the early difficul- 
ties through which he struggled, in 
conjunction with the original irrita- 
bility of his system, gave a strong 
tinge of morosity to his character, that 
morosity was not communicated entire 
and unsoftened to his writings. It 
did not form a constituent and essen- 
tial part of his compositions — a kind 
of perpetual and inseparable quality of 
the mind — nor was the same itch for 
controversy so completely engrafted 
into, and connected with it. He had 
not any of that foolish knight-errant- 
ry which leads forth its votaries to re- 
new, in the intellectual arena, the an- 
cient feats of personal prowess, and 
individual strength ; and which would 
sally forth, manfully dealing its blows 
to the right hand and to the left, care- 
less on whom they fell, and regardless 
what side they injured, for no certain 
purpose, or visible design, save to ma- 
nifest themightinessof its ownstrength. 
He did not vainly and ridiculoasly 
oppose himself to the world, for he 
well knew, that he who takes the 
world for his opponent, is sure, in the 
end, not to win ; and that, at last, his 
consolation will only be that of Na- 
thaniel Lee in the madhouse. " The 
world thinks me mad, and I think 
them so, but numbers have prevailed 
over right." He did not concern him- 



245 

self to answer every trifling and fool- 
ish attack which ignorance and ma- 
lignity might make upon him, for he 
well knew, that to do so is but to give 
duration to objects in themselves in- 
significant ; and which, otherwise, 
would be speedily forgotten. The 
only controversial compositions he has 
left behind, are his letters to Jonas 
Hanway ; and in these, there is such 
a spirit of good-humoured placidity, 
as completely to prove, that controver- 
sial rancour formed no part of his dis- 
position. Possessing, from his long 
intercourse with mankind, and deep 
insight into manners and men, much 
more practical good sense than his 
great rival, and entertaining a much 
greater habitual regard for established 
institutions, he was not so desirous 
of leading the multitude from the 
road they had frequented to new- 
formed paths of his own. He had too 
much reverence for what bore the sem- 
blance of truth, to wish to discredit 
its supporters ; or, by making attempts 
to beautify its outward appearance, to 
run the hazard of undermining its 
foundation in the end. With an equal 
portion of that ingenuity and novelty 
of fancy which gives new colours to 
every subject, and brings to every 
theme new and unhacknied accessions 
of mind, he had too much intellectual 
solidity to delight in framing hypo- 
theses which could not communicate 
to the mind that satisfaction on which 
he loved to repose — and without the 
power of giving which all theories are 
but empty triflings. He had too much 
soundness in his taste to split into 
systems and quarter into subtleties 
the unchanged and unchangeable prin- 
ciples of nature, or to convert into 
intricate and interwoven propositions 
the plain and unerring dictates of 
reason. His devotion to truth was 
too strong to suffer him to deceive 
others — his judgment too sound to al- 
low him to be deceived himself — 
whether the deceit was introduced by 
the reveries of a fervid imagination, or 
the insinuating dexterity of self-love. 
He is once reported to have said, 
" How great might have been my 
fame, had not my sole object been 
truth ;" and the fixed foundation on 
which his fame now stands, may be 
considered as some reward for his 
immediate self-denial. 

If we proceed to compare their res- 
pective intellects, it will, perhaps, be 



246 

rather difficult to adjust the balance 
of superiority. In the first, great cha- 
racteristics of genius, unbounded com- 
prehension of mind, and receptability 
of images — in the power of communi- 
cating, to mental matter, that living 
energy and alimental nourishment- — 
that intellectual leaven which gives it 
the capacity of being kneaded and 
worked up into an exhaustless diver- 
sity of shapes and figurations — in the 
power of extracting and drawing forth 
all that human reason, when bent to 
any given point, can educe — in the 
power of conceiving mighty plans in 
the mind without destroying, in 
the grasp of the whole, the beauty and 
the symmetry of the parts — in these 
first and foremost requisites of genius, 
the endowments of both seem very 
evenly divided, though the balance, if 
at all, preponderates on the side of 
Johnson. He had, certainly, more of 
the vivifying mind of a poet — more of 
that brightness of imagination which 
clothes all objects in a vesture of 
splendour — more of that fervid fulness 
which deepens and swells the current 
of thought— but not more of the 
boundless expansion and versatility of 
mind — not more of the variegated ex- 
uberance of imagery, or expatiating 
ubiquity of fancy. He had, perhaps, 
not so much of that wide sweep of in- 
tellect, which, like a drag-net, draws 
all within its reach into its capacious 
reservoir of illustration, and which 
diminishes and contracts the resources 
of ingenuity by its extraordinary pow- 
er of exhaustion ; nor had he any 
part of that fiery fervour, that indomit- 
able vehemence, which blazed forth in 
Warburton ; with which he could 
burst through every bondage, and 
overcome every obstacle ; which it was 
impossible to withstand in its attacks, 
or delay in its course ; and which, 
like the burning simoom of the Ara- 
bian deserts, absolutely devastated and 
laid waste the regions of literature, 
with the sultriness of its ardour, and 
the unquenchableness of its flame. 

In logical strength and acuteness- — 
in the faculty of seeing immediately 
the weak side of an argument, and ex- 
posing its fallacy with clearness and 
force — in those powers which Dr John- 
son has called the grappling irons of 
the understanding — each was superlat- 
ively pre-eminent ; and it would be 
difficult to decide which is the supe-r 
rior. Both great masters of the science 



On the Literary Characters of 



[Dec. 



of reasoning — endowed with that pe- 
netration of discernment, which in a 
moment pierces through the sophisti- 
cations of argumentation, and unravels 
the mazes of subtlety with intuitive 
quickness and precision — they were 
yet considerably different in the man- 
ner in which those talents were dis- 
played. In Johnson, the science of 
reasoning has the appearance of being 
more a natural faculty ; and in War- 
burton, more an artificial acquirement. 
The one delighted in exhibiting it in 
its naked force and undivided power — 
the other was fonder of dividing it 
into distinctions, and reducing it into 
parts. The one delighted to over- 
whelm and confound — the other ra- 
ther to lead into intricacies, and puz- 
zle with contradictions. The one 
wielded his weapons with such over- 
powering strength, that skill was use- 
less, and art unnecessary — the other 
made use of them as an experienced 
fencing-master, whom great natural 
strength, joined with much acquired 
skill, render irresistible. In the 
one, the first blow was generally the 
decider of the combat— in the other, 
the contest was often more protracted, 
though the success in the end not less 
sure. It was the glory of the one, to 
evince at once his power, and, by a 
mighty blow, to destroy the antago- 
nist who assailed him — while it was at 
once the delight and pride of the other, 
to deprive his opponent gradually of 
every particle of armour and weapon 
of defence ; and when he had riven 
away every obstacle and protection, 
exultingly and mercilessly to despatch 
him. 

In real and true taste, Johnson was 
unquestionably the superior. Dis- 
carding all those systems of criticism 
which had so long fettered and con- 
fined the efforts of talent, he first esta- 
blished criticism on the basis and 
foundation of common sense; and thus 
liberated our future Shakspeares from 
those degrading chains and unworthy 
shackles, which custom had so long al- 
lowed the weak to impose upon the 
strong. His critical decisions — where- 
ever personal hostility did not inter- 
fere, and wherever his want of the 
finer and more delicate perception of 
inanimate or intellectual beauty did 
not incapacitate him from judging cor- 
rectly — are, and ever will be, incon- 
testible for their truth, and unequalled 
for their talent, and carry with them 



1820/3 



Bishop Warburton and Dr Johnson. 



that undeniable authority and weight, 
which nothing can question or with- 
stand. Had he been, perhaps, a little 
less prejudiced, and a little more largely 
gifted with that fine feeling, which is 
as necessary to form a great critic as a 
great poet, he would certainly have 
been entitled to take a higher place in 
the province of criticism than any man 
who went before, or shall hereafter 
succeed him. Of this true taste, in 
Warburton there was a most lament- 
able deficiency : with an equal lack of 
the more delicate and imaginative qua- 
lifications for critical judgment, he 
possessed none of that sound discrimi- 
native power, and unerring rectitude 
of tact, which so eminently distin- 
guished Johnson. The bias of his 
mind in criticism seems totally per- 
verted and warped, and the obliquity 
of his critical judgment is often as un- 
accountable as it is amazing. A great 
part of this is owing to the bigotted 
adherence which he placed in the sys- 
tems of the French critics, so popular 
in England in the beginning of the 
last century ; and a much greater, to 
his own unconquerable propensity for 
adjusting and fashioning every thing 
according to the decrees of some stan- 
dard hypothesis which had taken pos- 
session of his mind, and on which, 
like the bed of Procrustes, he racked 
and tortured every unfortunate sub- 
ject, till he had reduced it, by a pro- 
cess of dislocation, into some conform- 
ity with his theories. His fondness 
for Dr Bentley, and Dr Bentley 's style 
of criticism, was also another draw- 
back in his qualifications : from him 
he derived that inextinguishable rage 
for emendation, which has descended, 
like the prophet's mantle, from critic 
to critic in succession ; and, indeed, 
what Bentley has performed upon 
Milton, Warburton has no less scru- 
pulously performed upon Shakspeare, 
though perhaps, with much more 
acuteness and ingenuity, in the exer- 
cise of his editorial capacity. For 
wanting this emendatory ardour — or, 
as he would call it, this critical vo»s — 
he despised Dr Johnson ; though, for 
his superabundance of it, Dr Johnson 
might much more justly have despised 
him. To Warburton, criticism was 
little else than ingenuity in inventing 
fresh varieties of the text, and dexte- 
rity and plausibility in their explana- 
tion. An author, chosen for the sub- 
ject of critical illustration, was to him 



247 

nothing else than a lamb led out to 
the slaughter, for the purpose of try- 
ing the sharpness of his knife ; or an 
anvil, by frequently striking which 
his commentator might elicit scintilla- 
tions and sparkles of his own. If he 
ever shines, it is always at the expense 
of his author. He seems utterly in- 
capable of entering into the spirit of 
his text — of identifying himself with 
his subject — of losing his own indivi- 
duality and consequence in his author 
and his author's beauties. He had 
none of that true and refreshing spirit 
of criticism, which pours down a 
fresh radiance on the withering beau- 
ties of antiquity, and discloses new 
graces wherever its illuminating re- 
splendences are thrown, and which, 
like the skilful varnisher of some an- 
cient painting, renews and renovates, 
in the subject, its brilliancy and rich- 
ness of colouring, without altering the 
character of its loveliness, or impair- 
ing the symmetry of its proportions. 

With the power of wit, both were 
almost equally gifted ; and the precise 
nature and description of that wit was 
in both pretty nearly the same. It 
was not that delicately gentle and re- 
fined species which distinguished Ad- 
dison, and which gave an almost eva- 
nescent air to the humour of his pages 
— but that coarse and forcible strength 
of wit, or rather humour, which it is 
impossible to withstand, and which 
breaks upon an adversary as a torrent 
impetuous and overwhelming — abso- 
lutely stunning and confounding with 
its vehemence, its energy, and its force. 
Those who wish to see this species of 
wit in its highest perfection, cannot 
be better referred than to the contro- 
versial writings of Warburton, or of 
Dr Bentley, from whom Warburton 
adopted his style in controversy. It 
was this overflowing and vigorous pos- 
session of wit which rendered John- 
son so powerful in conversation, and 
enabled Warburton in controversy to 
defy the hosts of enemies who assailed 
him. Of those enemies, many were 
more exactly learned as to the point in 
question than himself — many equally 
sound reasoners — and, what is of no 
small advantage in reasoning, had a 
much better cause to defend, but they 
were all in the end worsted, defeated, 
and put to flight, by the auxiliary sallies 
of his wit, which came forth in vollies 
as unexpected as they were irresistible. 
That this species of wit should fre« 



On the Literary Characters of 



248 

quently be coupled with scurrility, 
was wnat might readily be anticipated 
— it was totally destitute of delicacy, 
and had no refinement or polish. It 
perhaps cannot better be described, 
than by comparing it with the wit of 
Addison, to which it was, in all its 
shapes, totally dissimilar. The one 
was a weapon infinitely more power- 
ful — though the other required much 
more of dexterity and science in its 
application. The former was much 
more the instrument of a barbarian — 
the latter of a civilized combatant. 
The one was more fitted for the lighter 
skirmishes of intellectual warfare, and 
softened courtliness of social inter- 
course — the other more adapted for 
those contests, where no quarter is 
given, and no indulgence is expected. 
In the one, wit was so highly polished, 
as frequently to lose its effect — in the 
other, it was often so coarse and per- 
sonal, as to defeat its very purpose. 
In the one, it is the arch smile of con- 
temptuous scorn — in the other, the 
loud horse-laugh of ferocious defiance. 
The one was more fitted for the casti- 
gation of manners — the other better 
adapted for the concussion of minds. 
The wit of the former was, like the 
missile of the Israelite, often over- 
coming, from the skill with which it 
was thrown — and that of the latter, 
the ponderous stone of Ajax laid hold 
of with extraordinary strength, and 
propelled with extraordinary fury. In 
short, the wit of Addison, when com- 
pared with that of Warburton and 
Johnson, was what the polished sharp- 
ness of the rapier is to the ponderous 
weight of the battle-axe, or as the inno- 
cuous brilliancy of the lightning, to the 
overpowering crash of the thunderbolt. 
In poetical genius and capability, it 
would perhaps be unfair to compare 
them. What Warburton has written 
in verse, was merely the first juve- 
nile trying of his pen, and therefore 
hardly could hope to rival the mature 
and laboured poetical compositions of 
Johnson ; yet we may doubt whether, 
if Warburton had written more of 
poetry, he would have written better, 
or ever risen above mediocrity in the 
efforts of poetical talent. Of those 
higher qualifications of imagination 
and sensibility, which every true poet 
must possess, he was, as well as John- 
son, utterly destitute ; but he had not, 
like Johnson, a mind stored with a 
rich fund of poetical images, or a nice 



[Dec. 



perception of harmony in sound, or 
melody in versification. His transla- 
tions are merely the productions of a 
school-boy, and such productions as 
many a school-boy would be ashamed 
to own. He seems to have possessed 
no ear attuned to the harmony of num- 
bers — no fondness for the music of 
rhyme, or the march of periods. In 
this department of genius, therefore, 
he was utterly inferior to Johnson, 
who, if he did not possess the fine eye 
and highest exaltation of a poet, could 
clothe every subject he descanted upon 
with sonorous grandeur of verse, and 
gorgeous accompaniments of fancy. 

In the beauty of style, and the or- 
naments of language, Johnson, it is 
well known, was most immeasurably 
superior. His writings have given an 
increase of correctness and purity, a 
transfusion of dignity and strength to 
our language, which is unexampled 
in the annals of literature, and which 
corrected, in their influence on our 
dialect, the diffused tameness of 
Addison, and the colloquialism of 
Swift. Whatever nearer approaches 
have been made to perfection in our 
language, have all been established on 
the foundation of his writings ; and, 
perhaps, it would not be exceeding 
the bounds of justice to affirm, that 
more is due to him in the refinement 
of the English tongue, than to any 
man in any language or in any coun- 
try, with the single exception of Ci- 
cero. If his own style itself is not 
the best model in our language, it is 
from it certainly that the best model 
must be formed ; and, whoever shall 
in the end attain that summit of per- 
fection, it will be from the copious 
fountain of Johnson that his materials 
must be supplied. Of the graces and 
elegancies of diction, Warburton, on 
the contrary, had no conception: his 
thoughts were turned out in the 
dress which lay nearest to his hand ; 
and often their multiplicity was too 
great to allow him time to find for 
each a proper and suitable covering of 
expression. To harmony in the struc- 
ture of cadences, or splendour in the 
finishing of sentences, he was utterly 
void of pretension, and was, moreover, 
totally destitute of the power of se- 
lection or choice of words. Yet, he 
cannot justly be accused of neglect or 
contempt of the beauties of style, for 
no one altered more incessantly, or 
altered to less purpose, than Warbur- 



18200 



Bishop Warburton and Dr Johnson. 



ton. ,In one of his letters, lie acknow- 
ledges, that there are many thousand 
corrections and alterations merely of 
language in the second edition of his 
Julian ; and, to my own knowledge, 
there are no less than 20,000 verbal 
corrections in the several editions of 
his Divine Legation, almost every one 
of which has no other? effect than to 
render that worse which before was 
bad. He compared himself, in his 
alterations, to the bear who licks into 
form its shapeless offspring : but, with 
little felicity of comparison, for his 
alterations, though they always bring 
down and reduce to tameness the ori- 
ginal nervous force of the expression, 
have seldom the effect of adding to 
its elegance or removing its infirmi- 
ties. Very different, in this respect, 
was Johnson's character in writing, 
who is, like Shakspeare, hardly ever 
known to have altered or corrected 
his productions after publication ; and 
whose mastery of n diction was such, 
that it immediately brought, at his 
command, the best and most appro- 
priate language which his subject re- 
quired. The answering power of his 
expression, were always exactly propor- 
tioned to the demand of his thought : 
there is never any incongruity of this 
kind perceptible in his writings ; what 
he thought strongly, he could express 
forcibly and well ; and what he had 
once written, became fixed, and fixed, 
because it was impossible for altera- 
tion to improve, or correction to 
amend ^ it. The greatest fault, per- 
haps, in his style, is the want of 
flexibility — the want of variety adapt- 
ed for every varying occasion : it was 
too uniform to alter — it was too stiff 
to bend — its natural tone was too high 
to admit of a graceful descent — the 
same was the expression, and the 
same the pompousness of language, 
whether he descanted as a moralist, 
or complained as an advertiser : whe- 
ther he weighed in his balance the 
intellects of Shakspeare and Milton, 
or denounced, with threats of punish- 
ment, against the person or persons, 
unknown, who had pirated a paper 
of his Idler. In Warburton's diction, 
which was uniformly faulty, it is 
needless to expatiate on any particu- 
lar faults; we may, however, men- 
tion that it was overrun with foreign 
idioms, and exotic phraseology, and 
that it particularly abounds in Galli- 
cisms, which almost disgrace every 



249 

sentence. In both, the style doubtless 
took its tincture from the peculiar 
complexion of their minds ; and while 
in the one it swelled into majestic 
elegance and dignified strength, in 
the other, it broke out into uncouth 
harshness, and uncultivated force. 

In extent of learning, in profundity 
and depth of erudition, Warburton 
may justly claim the superiority. No- 
thing more illustrates the different 
characters of these great men, than 
the different manner in which their 
reading was applied. In Johnson, 
acquired learning became immediately 
transmuted into mind — it immediate- 
ly was con substantiated with its re- 
ceiver ; it did not remain dormant, like 
a dull and inert mass in the intellect, 
unaltered and unalterable, but enter- 
ed, if I may use the expression, into 
the very core and marrow of the 
mind, and became a quality and 
adjunct of the digestive power ; it 
was instantaneously concocted into 
intellectual chyle — his mind had 
more the quality of a grinding en- 
gine, than a receiver ; every parti- 
cle it absorbed became instinct with 
vital life — like the power of flame it 
consumed all approximating substan- 
ces. In Warburton, the power of 
digestion was certainly disproportion - 
ed to the insatiability of appetite : — 
what he could not retain, he was 
therefore obliged immediately again 
to eject, and he did again eject it, but 
not in its received and original state, 
but altered in its outward form and 
semblance, and mouldered up into 
some glittering and fantastical hypo- 
thesis, some original and more allur- 
ing shape, as different from its first 
condition as is from the crawling cater- 
pillar the butterfly which expands 
its golden wings in the air. The de- 
fects of his digestive faculty, were 
amply supplied by his power of assi- 
milation, which, spiderlike, had the 
faculty of weaving innumerable webs 
and phantasms out of the matter 
which was presented to it, and dis- 
guising and recasting into some other 
outwardappearance those morsels which 
were too hard to retain, and too pon- 
derous to swallow. Such indeed was 
the voracity of his appetite, that he 
refused nothing which offered itself; 
and the wide gulf of his intellectual 
appetite, often reminds us of the Boa 
Constrictor, after it has swallowed the 
Rhinoceros, as it lies in gorged and 



$50 On the Literary Characters of QDec, 

torpid fulness, stretched out in all its ment ; and what he had once learned, 



giant length on the ground. This dif- 
ference in the perception and appli- 
cation of knowledge, was distinguish- 
able in every production of these 
great men ; it is perceptible from their 
earlier works to their latest, and being 
occasioned by the peculiar construc- 
tion and formation of their mental 
faculties, it formed the character of 
their minds; and, therefore, conti- 
nued, without receiving alteration, from 
their first years of authorship to their 
last. In Johnson, therefore, learning, 
when received, might more properly 
be called knowledge ; it was stripped 
of its superfluous and unnecessary 
parts— it was winnowed of its chaff. 



his judgment was too sound to per- 
mit him to warp, and his love of 
truth too great to allow him to con- 
ceal. 

In private life, the character of War- 
burton was distinguished by the same 
kind of bold openness and unshrink- 
ing cordiality ; the same livid warmth 
in his enmities and friendships ; and 
the same impatient haughtiness and 
dogmatical resolution which stood 
forth displayed in his writings. No 
one communicated to his productions 
more of his own personal character, 
or drew his own full length so admi- 
rably in his works. After a perusal 
of what he has written, his character 



ffdeposTted'in the receptacles of lies in all its native colours before our 
a. , F 1-M. :„ ^xr„»-u„^» i«- wa e pvps. and we hardlv want the roti- 



thought, while, in Warburton, it was 
like clay thrown into a mould ready 
prepared for it, for the purpose of 
forming materials for building up to 
their measureless height the countless 
edifices of his fancy. 

In that practical knowledge of, and 
insight into human nature, which 
forms the chief qualification for the 
moralist, and the writer on men and 
manners, Johnson was greatly supe- 
rior to Warburton. The former had 
acquired his knowledge in the tutor- 
ing school of adversity ; and the long 
and dreary probation he had to serve 
before he attained to competence and 
success, had given him a sound and 
piercing view into life and human na- 
ture, while the haughtiness of the 
latter formed a kind of circle about 
him, which prevented his mingling 
with the crowd, and deriving, by uni- 
versal converse and acquaintance, an 
universal and comprehensive know- 
ledge of man. He was also a more 
prejudiced and less unbiassed specta- 
tor of mankind, continually referring 
their causes of action, not to the ac- 
knowledged principles of experience, 
but to some pre-conceived and ready- 
fashioned theory of his own, with 
which he made every deduction to 
square in and quadrate, and to whose 
decision he referred the settlement ot 
all the various anomalies and pheno- 
mena which distract the inquirer into 
human nature. Otherwise was the 
knowledge of Johnson formed. He 
was no speculatist in his views o 



eyes, and we hardly want the inti- 
macy of a personal acquaintance to be 
fully and thoroughly masters of his 
peculiarities. What he thought, he 
dauntlessly and fearlessly expressed. 
Disguise he hated, and subterfuge he 
despised. He who was the enemy of 
Warburton, was sure of bold, honest, 
and manly hostility ; he who was his 
friend was equally certain of the full 
participation of all the benefits of as- 
sistance and protection. It was one 
of his maxims, both in his public and 
private character, " He who is not with 
me is against me." He hated a neu- 
tral worse even than an enemy; to 
him indifference was worse than de-? 
cided dislike ; imperturbable placidity 
more disagreeable than a stonn. Pass 
over his opinions or his productions 
without giving any decided opinion as 
to their justice or their merits, and 
he would immediately number you 
amongst the list of his foes, and let 
loose upon you all the torrent of his 
mingled scurrility and wit. This fer- 
vid warmth of temper frequently over- 
powered the cooler dictates of his rea- 
son, and to this we may perhaps as- 
cribe that high and overstrained excess 
of praise which he showered down 
upon the productions of his friends ; 
for of flattery we cannot justly accuse 
him: he would have disdained what he 
conceived implied fear. One exception, 
however, must be made to this re- 
mark, and that is, the case of Bishop 
Sherlock, whom, during his life, War- 
burton extravagantly praised, and, at- 



was no speculatist in nis vie^ ™ ^~» j ? j ^ nQt onl 

acuteness and penetration of discern- grapna 
6 



' 



18200 



Bishop Warburton and Dr Johnson, 



Divine Legation with the utmost con- 
tumely and contempt. For neglect 
of his clerical duties, Warburton has 
been lashed by the unsparing hand of 
a relentless satirist, whose pictures are 
often less of true resemblances than 
hideous caricatures ; but the suffrages 
of many must overpower the testimony 
of one ; and it has been almost uni- 
versally agreed, that in the discharge 
of the social relations of life, his con- 
duct was equally faultless and exem- 
plary. The character of Johnson has 
been so often pourtrayed, and, through 
the admirable delineations of his bio- 
graphers, is now so well known, that it 
would be useless to attempt to de- 
scribe it. He had certainly more ha- 
bitual reverence for what he conceived 
to be truth ; was more rigid in his 
morality, more fervid in his piety, 
than Warburton. He had not less 
perhaps of pride and haughtiness, but 
his pride was more lofty, his haughti- 
ness more independent. He could not 
bend to greatness, nor stoop to rise as 
Warburton certainly could do, and 
sometimes did. His character, while 
it was much more dignified than that 
of Warburton, had not the same mix- 
ture of impetuosity and warmth, and 
thus he was prevented from falling into 
those excesses which the former could 
hardly avoid. Both had a certain por- 
tion of intolerance in their dispositions, 
but in Johnson that intolerance was 
exerted against the oppugners of that 
creed he had received from others, 
while in Warburton it was directed 
against the questioners of theories of 
his own. In the one, it was prejudice 
unmixed — in the other, it was always 
prejudice co-operating with vanity. 
Upon the whole, perhaps, the charac- 
ter of Warburton, notwithstanding its 
dictating and dogmatical insolence, 
was the most attracting of the two. 
There is, notwithstanding all its ef- 
fervescences and excesses, a generous 
fervour, a kindliness of soul, an en- 
thusiastic warmth about it, which in- 
duces us to like him in spite of our- 
selves, and to which we can forgive 
whatever is disgusting in his scurrili- 
ty or revolting in his pride. 

To bring my observations on the 
characters of these great men to a close, 
— in Warburton, the distinguishing fa- 
culty was a fiery and ungovernable vi- 
gour of intellect, a restless and irre- 
pressible vehemence of mind, an un- 
quenchable and never-dormant princi- 

Vol. VIII. 



25 1 

pie of action, which required con* 
tinually some fresh matter to work 
on — some fresh subject to exercise its 
power — some new and untried space 
to perambulate and to pass through : 
it was an ever- working and operating 
faculty, an ever-moving and resisting 
principle, which it was impossible to 
tire or tame. There was nothing like 
rest or slumber about it : it could not 
stagnate ; it could not stop : it was im- 
possible to weaken its energies, or to 
contract their operation. No matter 
was too tough for its force, no metal 
too unmalleable for its strokes. 

Such was the elasticity of its con- 
stitution, that it could not be broken ; 
such was its innate and surpassing re- 
sistibility of temperament, that it could 
not be overwhelmed. Entangle it with 
subtleties, and it immediately snapt 
asunder its bonds, as Sampson burst 
the encompassing cords of the Philis- 
tine. Bury it with learning, and it 
immediately mounted up with the 
brilliancy and rapidity of a sky-rocket, 
and scattered about it sparks and 
scintillations, which lightened the 
whole atmosphere of literature. It 
was this volatility of spirit, this forci- 
ble and indomitable action of mind, 
this never-tiring and never- weakening 
intellectual energy, this bounding and 
unceasing mental elasticity, which 
serves to distinguish Warburton not 
only from Dr Johnson, but also from 
all the characters who have ever ap- 
peared in literature ; and it is to the 
self- corroding effect of these qualities, 
that his alienation of mind at the lat- 
ter period of his life is undoubtedly 
to be attributed. 

The mind of Johnson, on the con- 
trary, was utterly devoid of all that 
intellectual activity and elasticity 
which Warburton possessed. There 
was about it an habitual and dogged 
sluggishness, an inert and listless tor- 
por, a reluctance to call forth its ener- 
gies and exercise its powers ; it slum- 
bered, but its slumbers were those of 
a giant. With more of positive force 
when called into action, it had not 
the same principle of motion, the 
same continual beat, the same sleep- 
less inquietude and feverish excite- 
ment. It lay there like the levia- 
than, reposing amidst the depths of 
the ocean, till necessity drove it out 
to display the magnitude of his 
strength. The one waited quietly in 
its den for food, while the other 
21 



252 On the Literary Characters of Warburion and Johnson, £Dec. 

prowled about continually for prey. 
To the latter, inaction was impossi- 
ble; to the former, voluntary exer- 
tion was unknown. Solidity and con- 
dension were the qualities of the one ; 
continued vigour and pliability the 
characteristics of the other. The one 
as a machine, was more clumsy in its 
movements ; the other, more light and 
unincumbered, but less effectual in 
its operation; the forces of the one 
were more scattered, the resources of 
the other less alert. In Warburton, 
there was a boundless fertility of vi- 
gour, which ripened up into all the 
rankness of rich luxuriance. In John- 
son, the harvest of intellect was not 
so spontaneous, nor perhaps its fertili- 
ty so great ; but when once raised, it 
never required the hand of the weeder, 
but rose unmixed with tares. The 
genius of one, like a cascade, threw up 
its water in the air, which glistened 
in the sun, and shone with the varie- 
ty of ten thousand hues and colour- 
ings ; while the talents of the other 
never exerted themselves, without 
joining at the same time utility with 
splendour. The one, like the Gladia- 
tor of Lysippus, had every nerve in 
motion, and every muscle flexible 
with elasticity; wnile, in the other, 
like the colossal statues of Michael 
Angelo, all was undivided energy and 
bursting strength. 

Such were the characters of these 
great men, of whom it is difficult to 
decide which was the greater, or which 



in a greater portion those 
qualities which give a title to intellec- 
tual supremacy. The fame of John- 
son will hereafter principally rest on 
his productions, as a moralist and a 
critic; while that of Warburton, 
when again revived, will as certainly 
be raised on the foundation of his 
theological writings. Whatever may 
be thought of the truth of some of 
his theories, or the unseemliness of 
some of his attacks, it is impossible to 
deny that his Alliance and Divine Le- 
gation are the most splendid, the most 
original, the most ingenious defences 
of our ecclesiastical establishment, and 
of revelation itself, that ever man con- 
structed. On these, as on the sure 
and unchangeable evidences of his 
powers, his admirers may depend for 
his reception with posterity; with 
whom, when the name of Johnson, 
rich in the accumulated tributes of 
time, shall hereafter be accounted the 
mightiest amongst those " who have 
given ardour to virtue, and confidence 
to truth;" then, shall the name of 
Warburton, also, purified from the 
stains which have obscured and sullied 
its lustre, be numbered amongst the 
brightestlights of the Protestant church 
— amongst the greatest of those who 
have adorned it by their genius, or ex- 
alted it by their learning, a worthy 
accession to the mighty fellowship and 
communion of Episcopius, Chilling* 
worth, and Hooker, 

C.R. 



SExMIHOR^E BIOGRAPHICiE. 

No. II. 

TO CHRISTOPHER NORTH, ESQ. 

Leighton Buzzard, 1st Nov. 1S20« 
Dear Sir, 
My performance of posthumous justice to QZX., my late deceased and much 
deplored friend, has been somewhat interrupted by a short absence from the 
peaceful privacy I enjoy at Leighton Buzzard. Your ready compliance, how- 
ever, with my desire, that these biographical jewels should not lie locked up in 
a bibliothecary cabinet, has made me feel that I am enabled to be a faithful 
executor to QZX.'s fame. By being evulgated in your Magazine, these are no 
longer folia Sybillina ; they shall not float about unfixed, at the mercy, not 
only of air, but of fire and steel. Had they not found such a receptacle, they 
might perhaps (when my enraptured eye shall no more pore upon them, and 
my protecting hand shall fail to guard them) have experienced the fate of ma- 
ny of their ill-starred predecessors. The erudite labours of him who was di- 
midium mei might, had they remained embodied in one frail MS. copy, have, 
some years hence, really felt those shears which had begun their preparatory 
flourish, when the original Magna Charta was but just rescued from being shi- 
vered into tailors' measures ; or they might have perished as fellow-sufferer* 



1865.] Transubstantiation. 39 

be taken in any sense conflicting with the realities of nature. 
The overpowc ring necessity, therefore, is all invagination. Thus 
there is no cc mpulsion to surrender the judgment of our senses, 
where there aJ b no natural impediments to then/ legitimate action ; 
and as there is in these words, on which th« argument of the 
Romish Chur jh reposes, not a necessity, as thfey contend there is, 
to lay the sen ses prostrate, in opposition to avery other instance 
of God's deal ngs with His creatures, of a similar nature, and in 
opposition to i law which we cannot conceive to be ever broken, 
since it invoh es a contradiction to truth itself, it is quite certain 
that the aposl les, as "simple-minded men,"|would agree with our 
view of the t rhole circumstance of the sacramental benediction, 
— that there yas no motive for thinking ona miracle in the least 
degree whate 1 er. The apostles might well as "simple-minded" 
men, imagine that our Saviour meant whaJthey saw in His hand 
to be signifies nt of His body; — and learniij g«md reasoning, after 
all, come to tl e plain common-sense settler] ent of the case at last, 
as indeed it i ras to be expected that they 
formed, we believe, almost or quite an int 



little though! of the labour and ingenuity 
Christ would give rise in future ages ; bu \ it would have been 
wonderful — i ppalling indeed, if even the d ost laboured exercises 
in Biblical li ;erature were not to arrive, ir a matter of sense, at 
the same cor elusion as our own natural fa nilties : it would have 
been most incredible, in short, if the mo t. subtle inquiries had 
obliged us 1 3 decide any otherwise thaji like the reasonable 
beings which God considers us to be in all His addresses to our 
understandings, and in perfect consistency with His dispensa- 
tions and Hk works. 

E. C. K. 



would. The apostles 
itive decision. They 
to which the words of 



J 



\ 



*Jr ' v^ > . t VA*1\\ \ \i\ 



V 



( 40 ) [April, 



BISHOP WARBURTON'S UNPUBLISHED LETTERS. 

Warburton is a:writer who, whatever influence, good or evil, 
he exerted on the English literature of his day, has at least 
inseparably attached his name to it. We can scarcely glance at 
the life of any author of that period without finding Warburton 
more or less connected with it. To the life, as well as to the 
works, of the greatest poet of his time, he contrived to affix 
himself so closely that there is no possibility of detaching him 
from them. We find him in connection with Bolingbroke and 
Middleton, with Jortin and Hume, with Wesley and Whitfield, 
with Cibber and Quin, with Mallet and Sterne. We look into 
the biography of Lord Chancellor Hardwicke, and we find him 
there ; we look into the correspondence of the author of Pamela, 
and we find him there. We think of commenting on Shak- 
speare, and we cannot write our comments without paying some 
attention to those of Warburton. 

It is to the force df mind shewn in what he wrote, and not 
to the real value of the writings themselves, that he owes the 
notice which he has received. The Alliance and the Julian are 
his two best pieces, considered as literary compositions ; but the 
Divine Legation of course displays more intellectual power. 
Hurd, speaking of this work to Warburton, said very justly, 
"There was something in your mind, still more than in the 
matter of your book,' which struck me." He could look, as 
Pope said, on all sides' ot a question, and if judgment or honesty 
did not always dictate his treatment of it, he never failed to 
handle it with vigour. Whatever was the worth of what he 
produced, it manifested mental power in the producer. 

A number of his letters, as the public are aware, have been 
recently brought to light, and lodged in the. British Museum. 
We have looked through the collection. We find many of 
them trifling and unimportant, relating to small matters of 
business or trivial occurrences ; but in others we notice passages 
of strong Warburtonian remark, much of it sarcastic. Some 
of these we have extracted, and offer them to our readers, trust- 
ing that they may find in them something to repay perusal. The 
letters to the Hon. Charles Yorke, Lord Chancellor Hardwicke's 
son, are the most attractive, as there was no one, except Hurd, 
to whom Warburton wrote with so much freedom ; and it is 
from these, accordingly, that our extracts will chiefly be taken. 

In 1753, after receiving from Lord Hardwicke a prebendal 
stall at Gloucester, which had been previously occupied by Cud- 
worth, he writes, — 

" Dear and honoured Sir, — I received your kind remem- 



1865.] Bishop Warburton's Unpublished Letters. 41 

brance from Caryl. He told me what you said of my relation 
to Cudworth, which I did not know. So much I did know, 
that this stall had been occupied by Bishop Bull. If these two 
men preceded me, one of whom was so eminent for profane 
knowledge, and the other for sacred, I accept the omen (many 
an ancient sage would have been glad of one so promising) for 
the success of my studies, which, you know, all tend to promote 
both, by the mutual light I make them lend to one another." 

When he took possession of his stall, he found that there 
had recently been a violent contest between the Dean and the 
Bishop about ecclesiastical rights ; on which he observes, — 

" As to the ground of this civil rage, the Dean's exercise of 
power, I suppose one may say of it, as of Sir Roger's head on 
the sign-post, much may be urged on both sides ; the features 
were enlarged, and a little ferocious ; there was something of 
the Saracen mixed with the mild Christian Dean. But he 
pleaded, what sanctifies all rogueries in the Church, conscience. 
In truth power ecclesiastical is a devilish bewitching thing, of 
which this good Dean has just given me a very lively example. 
Could you believe that this conscientious man, who grows every 
day fonder and fonder of Church authority, is quite satiated 
with civil power ? He came to me the other day, and with 
earnestness begged of me that when I went to town, I would 
present his duty to my Lord Chancellor, requesting it as the 
greatest favour, that his lordship would be pleased to strike him 
out of the commission of the peace, for that his age and in- 
firmities are so great as utterly to incapacitate him for the due 
discharge of his office. You will ask why the same cause does 
not dispose him to devolve his church power on Dr. Atwell and 
Mr. Wolley, who were so well disposed to ease him of it. All 
I can say to this difficulty is, that I believe age and infirmities, 
which disable men for the discharge of civil power, make them 
but the fitter for the exercise of the ecclesiastical ; for which, 
perhaps, many physical as well as moral reasons might be given. 
As thus, civil power, regarding the body and goods, requires 
health and reason to administer them; but power ecclesiastical 
is conversant only with spiritual things ; and that spiritual thing, 
the mind, like all other good things which are covered with a 
case or husk, is supposed to be then in perfection when the 
covering is quite decayed, and, as the poet says, lets in new light 
from the chinks made by time. Again, the passions of hu- 
manity are seen strongly to influence the proceedings in human 
judicatories, but the ecclesiastical admit of none of this weak- 
ness, as is evident from the proceedings of the most perfect of 
all, the Inquisition. Now extreme old age is observed to harden 



42 Bishop Warburtotfs Unpublished Letters. [April, 

the mind, and make it insensible to the foolish extremes of 
human pity. 

" I do all I can to mollify that stiffness which the past heats 
have left behind them ; and I come in the nick, like Rabelais' 
famed arbitrator, who never offered his arbitration till the two 
parties had bled pretty freely. Besides, that demon of conten- 
tion, which the evil spirit sent into I don't know how many 
cathedrals at a time, to inflame the canons against their deans, 
seems to have returned into the bottomless pit, and left both 
deans and canons to their usual repose." 

The following postscript to a letter written the same year 
may be worth transcription: — 

"You may value yourselves as much as you please about 
your precision of evidence in your courts of justice. Commend 
me to the little Island of Montserrat (as I find the case quoted 
in Barbot's trial) for carrying the point of positive evidence to 
perfection : ' Captain Watts was indicted for killing Ould in a 
duel. The witness swore she saw Watts draw the sword out of 
Ould's body ; but as she could not swear she saw him thrust it 
in, the jury acquitted the prisoner at the bar/ How nice, how 
delicate, how distinguishing is justice, when she is left to herself, 
and permitted to thrust her bandage aside \" 

In January, 1754, he reads Birch's Memoirs of the Reign of 
Queen Elizabeth, published shortly before, and says, — 

" We have been often told that Elizabeth's parsimony went 
to an extreme ; but I think we never had so curious a picture 
of it as in these Memoirs, where we find that to spare her 
gratuities even to her bedchamber women, she ordered the 
bishops, on their promotion, to give large sums unto them, and 
suffered herself to be solicited by them to influence even the 
Chancellor's decrees, as appears by the memorial of Dr. Fletcher 
on behalf of his brother's family, and the story of the Lord 
Keeper Puckering and one of the ladies of the bedchamber in 
the cause of Booth, who seems to have been a notorious offender. 

" These papers fully confirm what you long ago conjectured 
to me of the motives for the two Cecils traversing Bacon's 
pursuits at Court. And the resentment of the two Bacons for 
these ill turns, as they express it in these papers, throw new 
light upon Bacon's Essay on Deformity. What made me think 
of that was the reading of Mr. Hay's extreme pretty Essay on 
Deformity. Bacon, employing a Scripture expression (not 
quoting a Scripture affirmation), says, as he is quoted by Mr. 
Hay, p. 41, that ' deformed persons are for the most part void 
of natural affection.' Don't you think he had his eye on Sir H. 
Cecil, and his unkindness to this part of his family ?" 



1865.] Bishop Warburton's Unpublished Letters. 43 

Warburton, it will be recollected/ on visiting Oxford with 
Pope, was asked by Dr. Leigh, the Vice-Chancellor, if he would 
like to receive a doctor's degree in divinity ; and an offer was at 
the same time made to Pope of a degree in civil law. Both 
expressed assent; but Warburton's degree, through the influence 
of a party unfavourable to him, was refused ; and Pope, in con- 
sequence, would not accept his. Both afterwards made light of 
the matter ; and Warburton, in the following passage, affects to 
set a Lambeth degree, to which he was obliged to have recourse, 
above a degree from a University : — 

" You must know that, taking it into my head that a degree 
from the Archbishop was more honourable than one in course at 
a University, and would be a kind of sanction to my theological 
principles against bigots, etc., I wrote his Grace a letter on that 
head ; and my choosing to break the matter without the inter- 
vention of any other person, was, I told him, out of the respect 
and reverence I owed him ; as he was the only proper judge of 
the propriety of it, and so was quite free to determine what was 
fitting. I received the most obliging answer from his Grace, 
expressing the pleasure I gave him in affording him the oppor- 
tunity of shewing his regard for me, etc. I know you will be 
so good, when you next see him, to assure him of the extreme 
grateful sense I have of all his goodness to me, as you know me 
best, and become a kind of sponsor for me in bringing me into 
his knowledge and good opinion." 

In another passage he has another sarcasm at a doctorate 
from Oxford, "that Athens of loyalty and learning," as he 
calls it : — 

" It is hard to say if Church or State be at present more 
benefited by it. For I think the fashionable divinity of Hut- 
chinson is well-matched with the fashionable politics of Filmar. 
But it is certain Whigs and rational divines are at present the 
horror of that University. One thing of late among them was 
not so well; . . . their metamorphosing so many simple rustics 
into civil doctors. The unnecessary procreation of lawyers bodes 
but ill to a commonwealth. But the best of it is, that an Oxford 
doctor, like a trainband drum, forebodes no mischief or blood- 
shed." 

In the same letter he says, in allusion to his contemplated 
View of Lord Bolingbroke's Philosophy : — 

" I amuse myself with a thing, which, was you here, you 
would be plagued with, because I never like my things so well as 
while you are reading of them. I have a better reason for your 
reading them, but, to tell you the truth, this flatters me most. 
The thing will be without my name, and a secret. I wish it 



44 Bishop Warburton' s Unpublished Letters. [April, 

may in do way displease one I have so much reason to value as 
our friend ; nay, I would not even have it displease any of his 
friends on his account. You will ask me then why I venture 
upon it. I will tell you sincerely. I think it my duty ; for I 
am a Christian. I think I was designed to be the declared 
enemy of infidelity; for I am a little fanatical. If it was not 
for this, the iniquity of the parsons, with regard to me, would 
have deterred me. For though this thing be an apology, as it 
were, for the whole order, yet I am not certain whether it will 
not renew their clamours against me for the scurrility of my pen." 

The scurrility was so gross that Murray, Lord Mansfield, 
wrote Warburton an anonymous remonstrance upon it. As to 
the clergy, Warburton is constantly complaining that they were 
either too dull to understand him, or wilfully misunderstood him 
in order to abuse him. Impenetrability to his argument he 
charges upon Sir John Hill, the botanical Knight of the Polar 
Star, who thought proper to assail Lord Bolingbroke : — 

" Hill has wrote something against Lord Bolingbroke, and in 
the 481st page he charges me with holding that Moses did not 
believe the immortality of the soul. The man had no ill-will in 
this stupendous blunder. It was mere ignorance. Bolingbroke 
understood the matter better. He saw that all the force of my 
inference for an extraordinary providence, from the omission, 
depended on the truth that Moses did believe the immortality of 
the soul ; and therefore amongst various arguments he brings to 
evade my conclusion, he urges this as one, that Moses did not 
believe the immortality. I mention only this to shew you what 
readers and answerers of the Divine Legation I have had. You 
will be surprised when I tell you that Brown, who referred me 
to this place in Hill, did not apprehend the blunder, for he speaks 
of him as only differing from me on the question of the Divine 
Legation. In short, I never met with any body who understood 
the book but yourself and Towne. 

" A little before Barrow went on his travels he published his 
geometrical lectures. Ten years afterwards, on his return, he 
inquired who had read or understood his book ; and the number 
was reduced to two, though the two greatest mathematicians in 
Europe. On which he thought it time to turn himself to other 
matters. Something of this I am ready to do, if not to say, in 
my own case." 

In the beginning of 1756 Prior Park is visited by Potter, the 
son of the Archbishop, whom scandal declared to have been too 
intimate with Mrs. Warburton, and by Pitt, afterwards Earl of 
Chatham, who had then been obliged to resign the Secretaryship 
of State to Henry Fox, afterwards Lord Holland : 



1865.] Bishop War burton's Unpublished Letters. 45 

"Potter is here; so tins brought Mr. Pitt to dinner on 
Wednesday and yesterday ; which was oftener by twice than I 
wished. For a man who has used my friend with the indignity 
he did the Attorney a year ago, I profess the utmost contempt 
of, and so consequently cannot wish to meet. I should have had 
just the same sentiments of him, had you, instead of the Attorney, 
been the object of his ill-usage. For my friend in such cases is 
more than myself. One has not a right to forgive so easily as 
in one's own case. And of a colder friendship I am ready to 
say with Hotspur in the play, 

'Then out upon this half-fac'd fellowship.' 

I think just the same, and for the like reason, of the new Secre- 
tary [of State, Fox], for an ounce of friendship weighs more 
with me than a whole cart-load of politics. 

" Pitt appears very gay, very disengaged ; yet, through all 
this, I think I can see the marks of a restless disappointed 
ambition. I am much deceived in him, if he had even the least 
notion of friendship, but as the foundation of a political connec- 
tion. As his friend Littleton's [Lyttelton's] friendships, I 
believe, generally rose out of vanity, it would be hard to say 
which was most likely to be lasting, for flattery is as insatiable 
as ambition. 

" To tell you the truth, I am apt to be a free speaker, but I 
had not a good opinion enough of these people to be so. My 
politics make part of my morals." 

About the same time we find that Yorke, like most of the 
public, had passed an unfavourable judgment on Hurd's Seventh 
Dissertation on the Delicacy of Friendship, and did not approve 
of Warburton's fierce attacks on his opponents : 

"You remember," says Warburton, " what passed between 
us concerning the Seventh Dissertation, and how amicably each 
of us enjoyed our own different sentiments on that matter. But 
I took no more pleasure than you will do, to learn (and I learned 
it by accident, not from the author of the Dissertation, who does 
not so much as suspect that it is come to my knowledge) that 
your sentiments are as well known at Cambridge as to me. I 
ascribe this to the indiscretion of a common acquaintance [Dr. 
Brown, the author of the Estimate'], whom it is very like you 
might (as it was natural you should) have told your mind to on 
this occasion. This person, to excuse what he himself had said, 
and very strangely, I suspect used your authority, and abused 
your confidence, to justify his own conduct, which had not one 
feature of that perfect candour which accompanied all you said 
and thought of this matter. 



46 Bishop Warburton's Unpublished Letters. [April, 

" All this would not have been worth a single thought, had 
it not reminded me of my misfortune (a misfortune I do not 
think a light one), that, whether I defended myself against the 
most villanous abuses of my enemies, or was defended by a 
friend from the low scoundrel envy of one [Dr. Jortin] who had 
profaned that name, the vindication was never greatly to your 
satisfaction. I think, had it been your fortune to be used in 
this manner, either by open enemies, or, what is infinitely worse, 
by a false friend, I should have but little conception how the 
villany would be reproved or repelled too severely. But do I 
therefore complain on account of this misfortune? Far from it. 
I think our difference of judgment on this point a mere matter 
of taste, arising from the difference of constitution, and as little 
to be disputed about as that. All I complain of is this supposed 
indiscretion of our acquaintance; who, before he had an oppor- 
tunity of knowing your sentiments (if, indeed, he ever did know 
them, and I not mistaken in my suspicion), wrote very unfriendly 
to one in Cambridge, who replied to him in these words : — l We 
have seen the pamphlet you speak of. I dare say what you 
mention will be the general opinion. For our age, so happily 
refined out of all passion, is arrived at that pitch of delicacy, that 
it can bear neither panegyric nor satire; and this pamphlet, being 
a compound of both, is likely, for a double reason, to be very 
offensive/ The author of the Dissertation likewise answered 
him on this occasion, but in a very different strain : — ' Since,' 
says he, ' you have been so free to declare your disapprobation 
of that piece, I will tell you a secret which I have told to no 
other, and which your commendations should never have drawn 
from me, which is, that 2" writ it myself; that I write it in mere 
indignation at the paltriest and dirtiest fellow living [Jortin], 
not only without any knowledge or allowance of Dr. W., but 
with a fixed resolution that he should never know it. In this 
last, indeed, I have not succeeded, for he fixed it upon me with 
so little doubt, that it would have been a childish affectation in 
me to deny it/ 

" I know you will be charmed with such sentiments, however 
little satisfied you may be with the works they produce. One 
thing I am confident of, that in this whole matter your senti- 
ments were wholly guided by what you conceive to be my true 
interest." 

In the next letter he says : — 

" I was angry at Brown, and it was him I suspected of the 
indiscretion; and, therefore, I had a mind you should know it. 

"You know how I love you; and, therefore, I am always 
[so] impatient if I cannot bring you to think as I, that I bring 



1865.] Bishop Warbur ton's Unpublished Letters. 47 

myself to think as you. And what is it but your goodness and 
sweetness of maimers, as well as great parts, that make me desire 
this ? As to others, I am as indifferent as if I was no author ; 
as indifferent as a man can possibly be who sincerely thinks he 
finds truth in religion, and loves what he finds." 

In a letter written August 6, 1756, we meet with a passage 
shewing how Admiral Byng was calumniated : — 

" Byng is burnt in effigy in almost every town of Great 
Britain, and yet I meet with nobody who believes that he will 
be brought to the justice he deserves. I have been told from 
good hands that it is a notorious truth that he sought or accepted 
the command with no other view than to engross the plunder of 
the French trade; and, indeed, I think this is a key to every 
step he took. I find how the public begins to open its eyes con- 
cerning Lord Bath's Bill, and that the extravagant and mad 
encouragement given to seamen has now rooted out all the 
bravery of the British flag, and planted only avarice and pol- 
troonery in its stead. But if it were not a folly (almost equal 
to the knavery of factions) to suppose that they would be atten- 
tive either to common sense or common justice, while they were 
driving on the ends of their party, one would wonder they should 
not see that their beneficence might have been so directed, with- 
out being much abated, as really to encourage the bravery of 
the fleet, by giving half the capture of merchantmen, and the 
whole capture of men-of-war. God mend our posterity. The 
present generation seem resolved not to co-operate with him, 
and he will never do the work alone." 

From a letter of Oct. 2, 1756, we learn that Yorke solicited 
from his father the Deanery of Lincoln for Warburton, but that 
the solicitation was fruitless. 

In Dec, 1757, we find Hurd, at Prior Park, reading over 
with Warburton his Dialogue on the Constitution, " intended to 
confute that principle of Hume, that the Stuarts aimed at nothing 
but preserving the prerogative as they found it." " He has 
made," adds Warburton, " a marvellous use of a few hints I 
gave him." When he was preferred to the Deanery of Bristol, 
in 1758, he says that he considers himself obliged for it, not to 
Mr. Pitt or the Duke of Newcastle, but to Mr. Allen. " Had 
it been any personal consideration in the Duke of Newcastle, I 
suppose it would have been the Bishoprick rather than the 
Deanery ; for, if I am accustomed to rate myself at anything, it 
is merely by comparison with the market standard, and not for 
any intrinsic value." Of Brown's " Vindication " of his Esti- 
mate he says, " I told him I expected he should tell the world 
that no friend had any hand or concern directly or indirectly in 



48 Bishop War burton's Unpublished Letters. [April, 

this foolish matter ; and he has done so. You will laugh at the 
pompous Galimatias, in which he acquaints the world with the 
origin of his Estimate. He talks as being profound in a subject 
of which he knows nothing ; and I objected this to him, as I 
did to the general plan of his Apology ; that the offence taken 
by the public was chiefly to the manner, and his l Vindication ' 
is of the matter" 

Giving an account of his entrance on the Deanery of Bristol, 
he thus speaks of the Chapter : — 

" I found a very small cathedral, but it contrives to make as 
violent a noise as the largest. But with regard to the offices 
thereunto belonging, it bears much more the face of an hospital. 
I found myself attended (nor do I exaggerate, which you will 
be ready to suspect) by the deaf, the blind, and the lame, and 
with every kind of invalid but the dumb. Had I been an 
apostle, what noble subjects had I here to work upon ! I might 
have rendered this little blind deanery illustrious for its miracles, 
but being only in the number of those miserable sinners, doomed 
to pray for daily pardon and daily bread, I had only room for 
that other apostolic gift of charity, in its fullest extent, both to 
the living and the dead, for I can but just forgive the late Dean 
for his follies and absurdities." 

Speaking of Hurd, in 1759, he says : — 

"Your judgment of the Dialogues will make Dr. Hurd very 
happy. What you say of the first is so true, and was so little 
understood by a grave London divine, that you will smile when 
I tell you, that after having bought the book, he returned it to 
the bookseller in a great passion against the author, as a pro- 
fessed advocate for insincerity ." 

In December, 1759, he declares he will not resign his 
preachership at Lincoln's -Inn till there is a certainty for the 
election of Hurd in his place. About a year afterwards we find 
rising in his mind the idea of the remarkable charge which he 
delivered to the clergy of Gloucester in 1761, when he had 
become their bishop. He thinks of writing Directions for the 
Study of Theology, " from the first elements of thinking to the 
last sublimities of the chair;" observing that as he had seen 
"an indisposition in the clergy to receive a few plain truths 
because they were new, and perhaps because they were his," he 
" would try to put them in a way to find them out for them- 
selves," hoping, he adds, "to produce something not unnseful 
to the younger part of my clergy, to whom on this subject you 
may be sure I direct myself." 

In the same letter he relates what he calls his "last exploit" 
at Durham : — 






1865.] Bishop War bur ton's Unpublished Letters. 49 

"The Dean and Chapter had appealed against each other to 
the Bishop, and he had appointed his day of visitation to hear their 
mutual complaints, who were at the utmost distance with each 
other. The Bishop has such near connections with the Chapter 
that their honour and his are the same ; and I found him morti- 
fied that they were likely to become a spectacle to the gentry of 
the country, who appeared to enjoy the quarrel. At the same 
time he believed it impossible, from the claims as well as temper 
of the two parties, to make it up. However, I undertook it, and 
(though the only particular by both sides confessedly injured) 
they agreed to refer all things to me as a common mediator, 
which, with much labour and some difficulty, after sacrificing 
my own resentments to peace, I at length brought to pass, before 
I left the place, and on terms most to the honour of a mediator. 
They agreed, with the Bishop's consent, mutually to withdraw 
their reciprocal appeals, the Dean promising on his honour never 
more to intrench on their rights, and they, on theirs, to hold 
sacred his privileges and prerogatives. The conclusion was, that 
I received their common thanks, and left them in peace and 
cordial harmony. 

" Could I ever have obtained such an interest (and I have 
done much more to deserve it) in the benchers of Lincoln's Inn, 
they would never, in mere politeness and good manners, have 
suffered a forward coxcomb [Dr. Ash ton] to engage their votes 
at a next vacancy, when they had never received from me the 
least hint that I was disposed to leave them." Dr. Ashton, 
having met the Attorney-General at Prior Park, had " surprised 
him into a promise." Warburton was indignant that the 
Attorney- General, who had professed a regard for him, had 
allowed himself to be so entrapped, having "thus, for the sake 
of a stranger, transgressed the most established rules of polite- 
ness and decorum in the commerce of life." But, he says, " a 
more exquisite revenge I could not take against men failing in 
common civility towards me than by giving them Dr. Ashton 
for Mr. Hurd. And if the keeper will but give our friend 
[Hurd] a prebend, which Mr. Allen says is promised (and as 
little wonders how it came not to be performed last vacancy), it 
will better fit the laziness of his temper than a pulpit, though, 
in my conscience, I believe the University of Cambridge not to 
be out in their judgment, when they esteem Mr. Hurd one of 
the best preachers in England." 

In November, 1761, he gives us his notions of Convocation: — - 

"While I am thus anxious for works of charity [in support 
of the Gloucester Infirmary], my wiser brethren of the Convo- 
cation are displaying their faith, and, what is more, insinuating 

NEW SERIES. VOL. VII., NO. XIII. E 



50 Bishop JFarbarton's Unpublished Letters. [April, 

their ambitious hopes to the throne. They promise the king, 
if he will let them sit again to fight and squabble, they "will do 
it, as Convocation has never done before, like gentlemen and 
scholars. Had I been of the party, I should have excepted to 
this clause; and the silence in the king's answer I think would 
fully have justified me. "But I should not have stayed for the 
support of my opinion ; I should have been apt to say that I had 
two substantial objections to the clause: — 

cc 1st. Because the licence of the times, which the sitting of 
Convocation is supposed to redress, may be effectually repressed 
by the civil law now in force. 2nd. Were the Convocation 
allowed to sit, it would be unable, with all its canons mounted, 
to remedy the evils complained of. 

"The insolence of the Papists is righty belaboured, but why 
does the madness of the Methodists escape scot-free? Is super- 
stition more fatal, either to religion or government, than fana- 
ticism ? The attacks of Popery, indeed, like those of the scorpion, 
are silent and insidious; those of Popery, like the rattle-suake, 
give notice of its approach. But this makes no difference 
amongst those who are ignorant of the nature of those deadly 
pests of society. 

" The wisdom of councils, synods, and convocations, has 
always been held, in orthodox belief, to be the wisdom that comes 
from above; but St. Paul tells us that among the characters of 
this species of wisdom, this stands eminent, that it is without par •- 
tiality and without hypocrisy. But why should I be serious in 
an age so given to banter? All the use to be made of it is to 
afford you and me a little speculation after dinner in your 
library. Or, whether we laugh at or lament what we cannot 
mend, it comes to the same thing, while we equally submit in 
either case to the superior, though not to the supernatural, 
wisdom of our governors." 

In the next letter, written in the same year, he has a few 
more reflections on Convocation : — 

"There are many truths of speculation which, in certain 
seasons, become evils in practice. Synods are of this kind. 
You know I contended for the right in the ' Alliance/ but 
should have given my vote for its lving dormant till all the evil 

& ■. . . JO 

constellations that shed their influence on church matters were 
past and gone. But they who pretend to believe that they were 
the men, and not the stars, which were in fault, will satisfy 
themselves with a more familiar instance. When you have 
gagged a foul mouth (especially when it is of the feminine 
gender, as I think Convocation is), if you remove the obstruction 
before the rage and resentments of the owner have subsided, you 



1865.] Bishop Warburton's Unpublished Letters. 51 

make a bad matter ten tiraes worse. There is now no remedy; 
you must keep it in till she has lost the use of speech. 

" I am printing a little discourse On the Office and Operations 
of the Holy Spirit, — not in Convocation. You will ask, Quis 
leget hcec? Vet duo vel nemo. I answer, Turpe et miser abile ! 
I plough indeed an ungrateful soil, where the best seed will not 
give its increase till an age or two hence." 

The preceding passage contains an intimation of "the Doc- 
trine of Grace ; J> in the following he touches on it again : 

" I am calm enough to have my scruples whether what I am 
doing, the opposing of another species of madness, fanaticism, 
be not hurtful; for civil and religious madness may for aught I 
know be like two counter-poisons, which, when put together and 
suffered to work, are said to destroy one another's effects. 

" My detection, for so I might call it, of this species of 
fanaticism is yet in the press; so much has it grown upon me, 
that I am ready to subscribe to the advice of a late celebrated 
buffoon, ' Let none sit down and say, I will write a duodecimo.' " 
In another passage we have a reflection on the character of 
Bacon : — 

"One Sir David Dalrymple lately sent me a small collection 
of letters which he has inscribed to your brother, Lord Royston. 
It is extremely curious ; but a passage in one of Bacon's to 
King James puts the former to me in a more odious light than 
all his other meannesses and vices put together. It is at page 
51 : It is good to teach a parliament to work upon an edict or 
proclamation. precedent, i.e., to make the parliament ministerial, 
as Richelieu soon after did the parliament of P<iris. Such an 
anecdote as this is worth a volume of chronicle. Machiavel 
never gave so wicked nor half so able advice. Had James had 
a faculty to comprehend the fecundity of this principle (to speak 
in the physical language of this great man), he would have bid 
fair for his despotic rule. But he was for having his edicts pass 
at once for Acts of Parliament ; and they were so well supported 
by the star chamber, that the Parliament would have thought it 
a good compromise to be permitted to confirm them, and had 
been easily taught, had James been as good a schoolmaster in 
politics to his Parliament, as he was in Latin to his minister 
Somerset, to work upon an edict or proclamation. And then 
adieu to liberty. Such was the Attorney- General of those 
days." 

A letter written April 4, 1768, soon after the death of Sterne, 
affords us some not unjust remarks on Sterne's character: — 

" Poor Sterne, whom the papers tell us is just dead, was the 
idol of the higher mob, who have left the care of the public to 

e2 



52 Bishop Warburton's Unpublished Letters. [April, 

Wilkes and the lower, and rather choose never to go out of 
themselves than dishonestly to take a circuit back by the high 
road of the public. He found a strong disposition in the many 
to laugh away life; and, as every one makes himself, he chose 
the office of common jester to the many. But, what is hard, he 
never will obtain the frivolous end he aimed at, the reputation of 
a wit, though at the expense of his character as a man, a scholar, 
and a clergyman. But I suppose he thought with Wilkes (for 
mischief and folly are closely allied), who, in these late tumults 
when he was upbraided with sedition and blasphemy, in one of 
his advertisements told the public that the essential part of his 
character was a lover of liberty ; so poor Sterne's essential part, 
he would tell you, was to provoke a laugh. He chose Swift for 
his model. But Swift was either luckier or wiser, who so 
managed his wit that he will never pass with posterity for a 
buffoon, while Sterne gave such a loose to his buffoonery that he 
will never pass for a wit." 

In 1765, when he was revising his works, he speaks thus of 
writing for posterity : — 

"It was sympathy which first drew me to you. For kind 
nature, foreseeing what I had to suffer from ignorance and 
malignity in the pursuit of truth, early provided me with a 
delightful refuge iu your knowledge and candour, which was not 
only to recommend, but to convey, me to posterity. For I don't 
know how it happens, but those who are suspected of looking 
that way are always treated by their contemporaries as the 
Samaritans treated Jesus, because his face was as though he 
would go to Jerusalem." 

In another passage he speaks thus of prospects in regard to 
posterity : — 

" I have put the last hand to the first volume of the Divine 
Legation, and am going to launch it out for posterity ; a despe- 
rate voyage, like that of the ancients to the Fortunate Islands, 
for which many set out, but we hear of nobody that arrived. " 

Of anecdotes he remarks : — 

" It is true what you say, that anecdote has been Greek for 
falsehood ever since the time of Procopius. But we now speak 
plain English, and can lie without a figure." 

In September, 1762, he is just about to publish the Doctrine 
of Grace : — 

" 1 am afraid you will expect more than you will find in my 
discourse on the subject of fanaticism. I treat it less philoso- 
phically and speculatively than practically and popularly. I 
thought it of more use to give the picture of fanaticism in a 
living example, Mr. J. Wesley, whose account of his apostleship 









1865.] Bishop Warburton's Unpublished Letters, 53 

I have taken from his own journals. I have examined his pre- 
tensions to wisdom from above by every mark Scripture has given 
of it, and compared each of these at large with Mr. J. Wesley's 
own account of himself, in every circumstance he has delivered 
to us of his opinions and practices. I have selected him from 
the rest, because in parts and learning he is far superior to the 
rest, and formed of the best stuff that nature ever put into a 
fanatic, to make a successful head or leader of a sect. But, 
as Milton says (as great a fanatic as Wesley, but that the fire of 
it luckily ran all into poetry), he is fallen on evil days, very un- 
propitious to the fortune of religious fancies." 

In 1768 he speaks of a French life of Petrarch, which, 
having heard that it was praised by Mason and Gray, he had 
procured and read on their authority, and says that he had found 
it very amusing, the anecdotes in particular, especially those 
relating to Petrarch himself. " Here you will find," he observes, 
" that good Catholics, Petrarch and his numerous correspondents, 
as frequently call the court of Rome Babylon, as any Protestant 
reformer has done since, and rather with more evidence, since 
they had all those shocking enormities before their eyes which 
the following ages had only heard of." 

In the same year he describes himself as making slow pro- 
gress with the correction of the last volume of the Divine 
Legation, and determined to stay at home that his tardy advance 
may not be interrupted. " For an old author, like an old 
general, naturally grows less and less adventurous and enter- 
prising. However, though I am unable to give that continued 
attention that I was wont, yet I observe, perhaps too literally, 
the painter's maxim, Nulla dies sine lined. I do not certainly 
acquit myself of the fault that it has remained so long unfinished ; 
yet the iniquitous treatment that I have met with from scrib- 
blers of all denominations ought to share the blame ; that occa- 
sioned a disgust of the pen, which a man less resolute, or less 
convinced, had perhaps never got over." 

Alluding to Wilkes, he calls him " a convict blasphemer, and 
violator of all ties, human and divine ;" observing that he is now 
doing for the State what Sacheverel in the reign of Queen Anne 
did for the Church, the one being as much a disturber as the 
other : but asking whether the people, in the days of Queen 
Anne, would ever have followed such a character as Wilkes " for 
their leader in patriotism ?" 



Such are the extracts which we felt tempted to make from 
the letters to the Hon. Charles Yorke. Looking into those to 
Knapton the bookseller, we are surprised at the familiarity with 



54 Bishop Warburton? s Unpublished Letters. [April, 

which Warburton addresses him. To persons of that class he 
was generally very stiff and unbending. His letters to Richard- 
son, even after he had produced Pamela, begin with " Good Sir/' 
and end with " humble servant/' the printer being kept at a 
distance, though the author was commended. But Knapton 
he calls " Dear Sir/' and signs himself " ever most affectionately 
yours/' adding expressions of concern, also, for the health and 
happiness of Mrs. Knapton. In one of his letters he abuses 
booksellers in general, but Knapton, he says, he " sincerely 
loves." 

In speaking of Pope, and the fact that he had not destroyed 
the impressions of the Idea of a Patriot King, Warburton 
observes that he might easily have given orders for destroying 
them during his last illness, " had he been conscious of any 
oblique or lucrative views/' but that he was restrained " by his 
idolatrous fondness for the author," which led him, not only to 
admire whatever he wrote, but also " to abuse many honester 
men," because his lordship hated them. 

Knapton had been attacked in some publication in the year 
1751 ; Warburton, writing to him soon after, says, " If one had 
one's choice, one would wish such execrable papers as the 
magazines would meddle only with their own trash. But, since 
they do what they please in this blessed land of liberty, one had 
better see them impertinent than scurrilous. The public is a 
strange machine, which by fits is as easily wound up by the 
veriest dunce or idiot as by the best artist, nay, shall be set a 
going so perversely, that it shall not be in the power of human 
wisdom to reform it. It is the condition of human things that 
the most insignificant of all animals shall do most unaccountable 
mischief. The states of Holland had like to have been ruined 
by a single water rat. In such a case an author has consola- 
tion enough, because he knows justice will be done him by 
posterity. In the mean time the bookseller has none, who may 
have contributed as much or more than the author to oblige the 
public." 

Noticing the corrections that he made in his pages as they 
passed through the press, he observes that they relate chiefly 
" to the improvement of the style, or turn of the period, in 
which," he says, " I always endeavour to be very exact, and 
one always finds something or other of this kind to render more 
perfect." He speaks as if he were raising his style to something 
beyond positive perfection. 

When Bolingbroke died, he said, " I believe I have lost an 
enemy in his death, but I am sure our country has lost a 
greater." 



1865.] Bishop WarburtoyCs Unpublished Letters. 55 

Sixty-seven letters of Warburton to Knapton are preserved 
in all ; but they relate mostly to matters of business, and con- 
tain nothing of any importance to the public. 



Twenty-three letters from Sir Thomas Hanmer to Warburton 
are preserved among these papers, the first dated Dec. 24, 1735, 
and the last May 25, 1739. Warburton's letters to Hanmer 
were returned to Warburton at the close of their correspondence; 
none of them are known to be extant. Nothing appears in 
Hanraer's letters to substantiate Warburton's charge, that he 
trafficked with his papers on Shakspeare without his knowledge. 
Warburton was introduced to Hanmer by Sherlock, then Bishop 
of Salisbury ; and each declared that the other was the first to 
seek the introduction. Warburton appears to have offered his 
papers freely, and, perhaps, at the commencement of his inter- 
course with Hanmer, had no thought of publishing an edition 
himself. 

Hanmer, in his second letter, Jan. 1], 1736, expresses his 
apprehensions that Warburton is thinking of bringing his obser- 
vations to a conclusion, and that he shall in consequence ''lose 
a very great entertainment which his weekly correspondence 
upon that subject has afforded him." He hopes, however, that 
he will think of a glossary, and invites him, whenever he comes 
to Cambridge, to extend his journey to Milclenhall, which is only 
seventeen miles distant, and spend ten days or a fortnight there; 
or, if Warburton should be coming to London, Hanmer would 
" bring the books," and Warburton should " run them over in a 
few mornings" at his house. 

In his third, fourth, fifth, and sixth letters, Hanmer still 
declares his wish to see Warburton at Mildenhall, where he will 
shew him all his emendations ; " they shall lie," he says, " open 
before you;" aud observes that he had never so much hope of 
seeing Shakspeare restored to purity as since Warburton had 
promised him assistance. 

In several subsequent letters, written partly from Mildenhall, 
and partly from Wales, Hanmer acknowledges the regular 
receipt of Warburton' s letters ; says that he cannot too often 
repeat his thanks for those " punctual weekly returns of enter- 
tainment and pleasure," and discusses emendations of various 
passages. 

In the fifteenth letter, dated Dec. 13, 1736, after some allu- 
sion to a person whom Warburton accuses of having forgot the 
rules of honour and honesty through indigence, meaning, appa- 
rently, Theobald, Hanmer says : — 

" I hear with uneasiness of the expectation which you say is 



56 Bishop War bur ton's Unpublished Letters. [April, 

conceived of my making public the emendations and corrections 
I have made upon Shakspeare. Nothing was further from my 
thoughts when I began them ; I proposed nothing but amuse- 
ment in carrying them on, and no other end but my own satis- 
faction in getting as correct a copy as I could of an author I 
hold in the highest esteem. But there is nothing to which my 
mind is more averse than to become an editor ; and yet I hope 
you will not grudge the pains you have taken in communicating 
to me your remarks upon the same subject/' 

In the eighteenth letter, April 19, 1737, he again invites 
Warburton to Mildenhall, and in the nineteenth letter, June 
11, 1737, he alludes to Warburton having visited him there, and 
rejoices to hear of his safe return home : " for," says he, " as 
I wish you at all times free from misfortunes, so I should the 
most lament them, if from a journey undertaken from a motive 
of kindness to me any such should happen to you." But of 
what had passed between them during the visit, Hanmer says 
nothing, except referring to something that Warburton had said 
of printing and bookselling, and observing that Warburton was 
not likely to be recompensed for an edition of Shakspeare, 
printed in such a style as he, Hanmer, should like to see it. 

Three more letters follow, in very friendly style, containing 
remarks on various passages of Shakspeare. The last of these 
three is dated Oct. 29, 1737, and concludes with a hope that he 
shall have (< the favour of receiving " more emendations from 
Warburton. 

Then comes the concluding letter of all, dated Mildenhall, 
May 25, 1739, the correspondence having been intermitted for 
nearly a year and a half. 

(t Sir, — I have received your letter, in which a new scene is 
opened to me, a scene of complaints not quite professed, but 
strongly implied, at the same time that I suspected nothing in 
the world less than any discontent harboured in your mind 
against me. I am glad now to find it proceeds altogether from 
a mistake, for you take it for granted that I have thoughts of 
publishing a new edition of Shakspeare, in which your informa- 
tion, from whencesoever it came, hath much deceived you. It 
is true that when I was last at London, partly out of curiosity, 
but chiefly from a desire to satisfy myself whether any advan- 
tage could be made out of it to you, I did ask some questions, 
both of Mr. Gyles and Mr. Tonson, and desired an estimate of 
the expense of an edition so beautified and in such a manner as 
I thought the author deserved. If the answer had been en- 
couraging, I intended to have communicated it to you, but the 
consequence of the inquiry was only to convince me that far 



1865.] Bishop War bur ton's Unpublished Letters. 57 

from a prospect of raising any benefit to you, there was no like- 
lihood of any booksellers entering into the undertaking, even 
though no such demand were to go along with it. You see, 
therefore, I was not out in my conjecture that it could not be 
made worth your while to trouble yourself in it, supposing the 
work to be carried on in such a manner as I wished to see. 
After this step, which I have truly related to you, I do assure 
you I took no other, nor is anything going on towards a publica- 
tion on my part, but my books rest quietly upon my own shelves, 
and so they are likely to do. You have, therefore, the field open 
and clear to you, and I wish you good success in a matter which 
you tell me is of such great consequence to you. I am far from 
alleging any engagements to me which should prevent you, for I 
know of none on either side. The commerce begun and carried 
on between us I never looked upon in any other light but as pro- 
ceeding from an agreement in our veneration for the same author, 
a concern to see so much good sense buried under the rubbish 
of a most vitiated text, and a pleasure which arose to both from 
communicating our thoughts to each other upon it. This was 
all my motive, this my only view, and I confess I thought the 
same had been yours too, for neither from the Bishop of Salis- 
bury [Sherlock], nor from yourself, had I the least hint of your 
intention towards a new edition, which you now tell me was 
always in your mind. From my mistake in this particular, it 
may very well be that my sentiments and answers from time to 
time have been unsatisfactory to you, for which I now ask your 
pardon. 

" As to your demand of having your letters all returned to 
you, I hope I shall have it in my power to comply with it. It 
is not my custom generally to keep letters by me, but I think I 
have kept all yours, not from an expectation I had that I should 
ever be called upon to restore them, or should ever be made 
responsible for them as matter of property, but because I might 
have occasion to look over them again. If I have left none at 
London, I shall soon find them all here, and I will get them 
together, and send them according to the direction I have 
received from you. 

"I am, Sir, 

" Your humble servant, 

"Tho. Hanmer." 

Thus we are left somewhat in perplexity how we ought to 
decide between the two. Hanmer, in his letter to Dr. Joseph 
Smith, dated Oct. 28, 1742, and given at length in Mr. Selby 
Watson's Life of Warburton, speaks of his desire at that time 



58 Bishop War burton's Unpublished Letters. [April, 

to publish a new edition of Shakspeare, and declares himself 
satisfied that Warburton has no intention to publish one. He 
also states, in the same letter, that it was Warburton who applied 
to the Bishop of Salisbury for an introduction to him, in order 
to communicate some notes on Shakspeare which he had still 
lying by him, over and above those printed by Theobald ; that 
they in consequence corresponded by letter, and that Warburton 
visited him at Mildenhall, where he stayed about a week, and 
had the inspection of all Hanmer's books, Hanmer having then 
no suspicion that Warburton had any other design than that of 
contributing to the improvement of Shakspeare' s text, an object 
which they had both very much at heart, but that afterwards 
views of interest began to shew themselves, Warburton dropping 
hints of "the advantage he might receive by publishing the 
work thus corrected ;" but that as Hanmer did not fall in with 
Warburton's views, Warburton "flew into a great rage," and 
demanded back his papers, upon which all intercourse between 
them came to an end. This statement Warburton violently con- 
tradicted, declaring that Hanmer sought the introduction from a 
desire to profit by his annotations; that he visited Hanmer 
after repeated requests ; that he had no resentment at Hanmer 
until he heard that he was applying to a bookseller in London 
about an edition, in which he was going to make use, as he told 
the bookseller, of his (Warburton' s) notes; and that he then 
demanded his papers back from Hanmer, who unwillingly gave 
them up, after cavilling about his right of property in them. 

From Sir Thomas Hanmer's last letter it rather appears that 
Warburton had spoken of making Sir Thomas "responsible" 
for his letters " as matter of property," and that Sir Thomas 
gave them up without hesitation. The "great rage" into 
which Warburton flew seems to have been in his letters, not at 
any personal interview. 

Certainly it is hard to believe that Hanmer, who in 1742 
was preparing to publish his edition at Oxford, after finding 
publication impracticable in London, had not had thoughts of 
publishing in 1739, and had been collecting notes merely from 
a desire to have a corrected text of Shakspeare on his own 
shelves. But however he may have dissembled his intention to 
publish, there is no proof that he made any use of Warburton's 
notes without Warburton's permission. 

It is observable that throughout the whole correspondence 
there is great stiffness and ceremony towards Warburton on 
Hanmer's part. His letters uniformly begin with " Sir," etc., 
and end with "your obedient" or "humble servant." As to 
his corrections of Shakspeare's text, he says of them, " 1 give 



1865.] Bishop War bur ton's Unpublished Letters. 59 

no loose to fancy, but keep the most cautious reserve imagin- 
able ;" but in truth they are very far from deserving this cha- 
racter, for, they are much too venturesome, wandering away 
from the text, and by no means justifying Johnson's opinion of 
Hanmer's fitness for such studies. 



*** These letters passed by inheritance from Mrs. War- 
burton, the Bishop's widow, to her second husband, the Rev. 
John Stafford Smith ; from Mr. Stafford Smith to his second 
wife j from Mr. Stafford Smith's second wife to her nearest 
relative, the late Miss Wolferstan, of Tamworth ; and from her 
to her nephew, the Rev. John Mill Chanter, the present Rector 
of Ilfracombe, who disposed of them to the British Museum. 
There appears to be no doubt that Mrs. Warburton destroyed 
much of the. Bishop's correspondence, especially such as had 
any relation to private matters. 



Royal Society of Literature. — Jan. 4. — J. GL Teed, Esq., Q.C., in the chair. — 
H. B. Owen, Esq., Eev. H. Clare, A. Whitworth, Esq., and J. N. Mangles, Esq., 
were elected Members. — Sir C. Nicholson, Bart., read a paper " On some Small 
Egyptian Stela3 recently procured by him at Cairo." These stelae, which are six 
in number, are formed of a soft calcareous limestone, and are about ten inches 
square, and from sixteen to eighteen inches long. They are said to have been 
found at Memphis. As the surface of the material is very rough, the inequali- 
ties had to be filled up with cement before the chisel was applied to them, from 
which circumstance, and a thick crystalline efflorescence with which they are 
covered, it has been a matter of much difficulty to obtain a satisfactory inter- 
pretation of the inscriptions with which they are covered. It is probable that 
they may have once belonged to one of the several tombs which were excavated 
by the Prussian mission in the neighbourhood of the Great Pyramid of Sakkarah. 
Although the surface is much corroded, the traces of the sculpture are still well 
marked, and display a style of execution not far removed from the best examples 
of Egyptian art. Portions of the original colouring applied to the surface are 
still discernible : the outlines are given in deep intaglio, and the forms of the 
kneeling as well as of the standing figures, with their flowing drapery, are well 
delineated. As far as the inscriptions can be made out, they would seem to be 
sepulchral memorials of different officers attached to Memphis, and especially 
of one named Mes, a name which recalls in its form that of the Jewish law-giver, 
Moses, and which is, indeed, so transcribed by Manetho. The date of these 
fragments is believed to be about the period of the nineteenth dynasty. 



( 60 ) [April, 

METAPHYSICAL SCHOOLS AMONGST THE JEWS, DOWN TO 
THE TIMES OF MOSES MAIMONIDES. 

The part of M. Mimk's work which treats of Jewish philosophy, 
is necessarily shorter than that which refers to the Arabs. If we 
except Ibn-Gebirol, Moses Maimonides, Leo Hebraeus and a few 
others, all the mediaeval writers of Hebrew origin were mere 
Biblical commentators, or else they exercised their ingenuity in 
illustrating the mysteries of Rabbinical literature. Still, however, 
the question we are now approaching deserves to be thoroughly 
examined, and we are fortunate in having at our disposal an 
ample stock of materials, which we shall endeavour to condense 
for the benefit of our readers. 

The books of the Old Testament present to us no system of 
philosophy in the generally received sense of the word ; no trace 
can be found there of those speculations in which both the Greeks 
and the Hindus so freely indulged; the Hebrews, as M. Munk 
remarks, did not seek to penetrate into the secret of being ; the 
existence of God, the spirituality of the soul, the knowledge of 
good and evil, were with them a matter of faith, not the result 
of a series of syllogisms. And yet, to every thinking mind, 
the existence of evil in a world created by Him who is the 
supreme God, must have always been a most puzzling problem. 
How can it be admitted without seeming to impose limits upon 
that Being from whom no evil can proceed ? And how can these 
limits be ackuowledged without thereby denying the Unity of 
the absolute God, — without falling into Dualism ? The answer 
given to these questions by the Mosaic doctrine may be summed 
up as follows : — 

" Evil has no real existence : it has no place in creation, which, being 
the work of God, cannot be at the same time the abode of evil. At each 
period of creation God saw that it was good. Evil enters this world only 
when intellect makes its appearance ; that is to say, at the moment when 
man, having become an intellectual and moral being, is destined to struggle 
against matter. A collision then takes place between the intellectual 
principle and the material one, — and from this collision evil results ; for 
man, gifted as he is with moral perception, and enjoying the freedom of 
his movements, should endeavour to make his actions harmonize with the 
supreme good; — and, if he allows himself to be conquered by matter, he 
reduces himself to become the artizan of evil. This theory of evil, contained 
in the third chapter of Genesis, is intimately connected with that of the 
freedom of the will, which is one of the fundamental doctrines of Mosaism ; 
man enjoys absolute liberty in the use of his faculties; — c life and good, 
death and evil, are set before him ' (Deut. xxx. 15, 19). It is important 
to bring out here, in all its force, this doctrine, in subordination to which 
the Jews have always placed the various metaphysical speculations of 



1865.] Metaphysical Schools amongst the Jews. 61 

foreign origin, which they embraced at different epochs. The develop- 
ment of this theory, in its connection with Divine Providence, and with 
the will of God, considered as the sole cause of creation, has ever been 
deemed by Jewish teachers one of the most important topics for their 
meditation. " a 

By way of farther illustrating this remark of our author, we 
may perhaps be allowed to quote a passage from Moses Maimo- 
nides' tract on repentance : — 

" .... It follows that the sinner himself is the cause of his own ruin ; 
it therefore befits him to weep and lament over his sin, and [to grieve] for 
having done this to his own soul, by dealing so wickedly with the same. 
This is what is written [immediately] after the verse quoted above : — 
1 Wherefore doth a living man complain? etc. (Lam. iii. 39). And then he 
(the prophet Jeremiah) says again : — since the power [of doing good or 
evil] is in our own hands, and since all the wicked deeds which we have 
committed, have been committed with our [full] consciousness, it befits us 
to turn penitently and to forsake our wickedness ; the power [of doing so] 
being still in our hands. This is what is written [immediately] after [that 
verse] : — ' Let us search and try our ways, and turn {again to the Lord]' 
(Lam. iii. 40). Now, this matter is a very important principle; nay, it is 
the pillar of the law and of the commandments, as it is said: — ' See, I 
have set? etc.,' (Dent., ubi supra), meaning that the power [of doing good 
or evil] is in your hands, and that any of the actions [which are within the 
reach] of men, if one choose to do them, whether good or evil, he can. 
And for this reason it is also said, ' that there were such a heart in them 
(Deut. v. 29) ; by which it was meant to express, that the Creator neither 
compels the sons of men, nor decrees that they should do [either] good or 
evil, but that all this is left to themselves."* 

We do not think it necessary to give any details in this 
article respecting the state of Jewish theology during the golden 
age of that nation. The observations we might make on the 
various books of the Old Testament or on the sects of the Phari- 
sees, Sadducees, and Essenes, would be mere repetitions or re- 
sumes of the able disquisitions published in modern Cyclopaedias. 
We shall therefore go on at once to the first centuries of the 
Christian era, and consider the Jews as they stood immediately 
after the appearance of the promised Messiah. The circumstances 
amidst which they were thrown told most unfortunately upon 

« Munk, Melanges, p. 462. 

b The main principles of the Creed and Ethics of the Jews, exhibited in selections 
from the Yad Hachazakah of Maimonides, with a translation, etc. By Hermann 
Hedwig Bernard, pp. 264, 265. Cambridge. 1832. 8vo. Cf. Also the sum- 
mary of the doctrine of Maimonides on " free-will," given in the notes to a Latin 
translation of the same work . — R. Mosis Maimonidis tractatus duo : 1. " De doc- 
trina legis, sive educations puerorum. 2nd. De natura et ratione pcenitentice apud 
Hebrozos. Latine reddidit, etc., Bobertus Clavering. pp. 148 — 151. Oxford. 
1705. 4to. And the Ductor Perplexorum. Part III. Cap. xvii. pp. 375—384 
of Buxtorf's translation. 



62 Metaphysical Schools amongst the. Jews. [April, 

intellectual culture ; in the first place the nation was absorbed 
by the political struggles which followed the terrible catastrophe 
of Jerusalem; and when, after the unfortunate attempt of Bar- 
cochebas, the doctors who succeeded in escaping from the ven- 
geance of the Romans, became convinced that Jerusalem could 
no longer be the centre of their worship, and the head-quarters 
of the Jewish community, their first care was to strengthen the 
bonds which could link together as a religious society the chil- 
dren of Abraham, throughout all the civilized world. The system 
of the Pharisees, embraced by the majority, did not allow of 
merely confirming the authority which belonged to the sacred 
books; it was necessary that an equal weight should be attached 
to traditional interpretations and developments which had till 
then only been inculcated by oral teaching, for the few partial 
written reproductions of these commentaries could not aspire to 
the honours of canonicity. Such was the origin of the Mischnd 
(SevreQCQCTLs in Justinian's Novella), which appeared during the 
first quarter of the third century, and which it took three hun- 
dred years to annotate, to discuss, and to amplify. At the same 
time an immense critical undertaking was begun for the purpose 
of fixing irrevocably the text of the sacred books from a collec- 
tion of the most authentic MSS. ; and, in their desire for accu- 
racy, the Rabbis went so far as to count the letters contained in 
each book. Throughout the voluminous compilations which 
remain to us, and which were made during the first five or six 
centuries of the Christian era, in the Talmud as well as in the 
allegorical interpretations of the Scriptures, there are only few 
traces of metaphysical speculations. If we often find there re- 
miniscences of Kabbalistic doctrines, they bear almost exclusively 
upon angelology and exoteric points; the existence of the specu- 
lative part of the Kabbala — a part respecting which we shall on 
another occasion have more to say, is revealed to us merely by 
the mention of the mysteries contained in the Bereschith or the 
first chapter of Genesis, and in the Mercabd or visions of Ezekiel.* 
A complete account of the Talmud, its history and its litera- 
ture, would require a separate article, and therefore is quite 
inconsistent with the scope of the present essay; but in order to 
give our reader an idea of what may be called the esoteric doc- 
trines of Rabbinism, we shall put together a few passages relat- 
ing to the Mercabd, just mentioned. After discoursing of the 
angels and other spiritual intelligences which occupy an inter- 
mediate place between God and man, Maimonides says : — 

" That which we have said on this subject in these two chapters, is as 
c Munk, Melanges, pp. 469, 470. 










I* 









x 0o 










I 






Deacidified using the Bookkeeper process. 
Neutralizing agent: Magnesium Oxide 
Treatment Date: August 2005 

PreservationTechnologies 

A WORLD LEADER IN PAPER PRESERVATION 



\ 



. . J Thomson Park Drive 
Cranberry Township, PA 16066 
(724) 779-21 1 1 



J> "k 


















r> ? 






*/$&y. % ++ / o^^s^ 






^w 









4 



.0 © 



A 



v. 









r^ ^,^ N 






^% 









x ^ 














^ V 
















* v 



.4> *r 




£ ' 







,0 o 









.-^ 



/oC' ''■>- ^ ^e§^ %. 



y-x> 



,0c 

























->, '' 












, 















^> <£ - 



LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 




012 039 352 2 




Muni 

■HBHHKel 

DQBnilOtMEiO^BlwBNHulfl^^nHBmlnlil 



ffl ffl MBi BHBBlg 

nfluMlHHUHMHfflMnfVn 

BfiKSflflfflaHDnla 
HSSil HmnSn 

WJMBWemBM 

mESE tt Ha WB r mraa! 




Sft&ffigffignHffiSraS 



